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Why your fill wasn’t the price on the screen — and what each dial in Transaction Settings actually does to your money.

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Slippage

What it is. Between your click and your fill, other trades land and move the pool. Slippage tolerance = the worst price you’ll still accept. Inside the cap → you fill at whatever it moved to. Outside → the trade reverts. The trade-off. Tight slippage protects your price but fails your entries on volatile tokens. Loose slippage fills everything — including fills you’ll regret. There is no “right” number, only the right number for the pool:
  • Deep, established pool: 1–5%
  • Young trenches token: 20–30% is honest about the volatility
  • “It keeps failing, I’ll set 50%+”: stop and ask what you’re chasing. A candle that outruns 30% slippage is a candle you’re late to.
The hidden risk of high slippage: your tolerance is visible in the transaction. A 50% cap tells a sandwich bot exactly how much it can extract from you and still get your fill through. Which brings us to —

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MEV & sandwiches

The attack. Your pending buy is visible in the public mempool. A bot sees it, buys before you (pushing the price up), lets your buy land at the worse price, then sells into your fill. Their profit = your slippage budget. This is industrial-scale — tens of thousands of SOL are extracted from traders every month on Solana alone. The defense. MEV protection routes your transaction privately to the block producer, so bots never see it in flight. Nothing to see = nothing to sandwich. The cost. Private routing can land marginally slower than raw broadcast. For small fast punts that’s a real trade-off; for size it isn’t a question — keep protection on. Getting sandwiched on a $5k buy costs more than any latency ever will.

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Priority fees

What they are. Chains process transactions in fee-priority order. The priority fee (tip) buys your place in line — critical on Solana during hot moments when everyone is trying to enter the same block. How to think about it. Priority fees are the auction for being early, and their market price changes minute to minute. Trady’s dynamic default tracks network conditions; raise it manually when a meta is running hot and fills are lagging. It goes to the network — paying more doesn’t enrich the terminal, it just outbids other traders. The mistake to avoid: paying a top-of-block priority fee to enter a token that already 5x’d is paying premium latency prices for a FOMO entry. Priority is for when being 2 seconds earlier is the edge — not a substitute for being right.

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How the three interact

A trench entry during a hot launch: priority fee gets you into the block early, MEV protection keeps bots from taxing you on the way in, slippage caps the damage if the pool moves anyway. Set as a preset once (Filters & Presets), fire with one click (Instant Trade).