Why there is no correct value
Every setting in a sniper is a dial between two things that are both good and cannot both be maximised. That is the whole reason the setting exists rather than being hard-coded by the people who built it.
| Setting | Raising it gives you | Raising it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Slippage tolerance | More fills | Worse average price |
| Priority fee | Better position in the slot | Cost on every attempt |
| Position size | More upside per win | More slippage, lower fill rate |
| Take profit level | Bigger wins when reached | Fewer wins reached |
| Stop loss distance | Fewer stop-outs on noise | Larger loss when wrong |
| Max concurrent | More shots at once | Attention and capital spread thin |
| Screening strictness | Fewer bad entries | Fewer entries overall |
Entry controls: size, slippage, priority fee
Position size
This is the setting that silently controls two others. Size relative to pool depth determines how much your own order moves the price, which determines how much slippage you incur and how likely your slippage check is to trip. Size against the pool, not against your balance.
Slippage tolerance
A ceiling on how much worse than quoted a fill may be before the transaction refuses. Set too tight on a fast curve, everything fails and you pay for the failures. Set too wide, everything fills at prices you would not have accepted if asked directly.
- Failing constantly on contested launches: the tolerance is fighting the curve, but check sizing before widening.
- Filling constantly at prices that disappoint: the tolerance is too wide and is hiding the real cost of entry.
- Different venues deserve different values, because curve depth differs by venue and by stage.
Priority fee
A price per compute unit that affects where you sit in a contested slot. It is an auction, so the useful value is not a constant but a response to conditions. A fixed priority fee is either overpaying on quiet launches or underbidding on busy ones, and usually both in the same week.
Exit controls: take profit, stop, trailing, hold
Exits decide the result and get a fraction of the attention entries do. All four controls should be attached at the moment the position opens, not decided while watching it.
- 1Take profit, preferably ladderedSelling in steps removes the need to be right about a top. A single level is a bet that the move stops exactly where you guessed.
- 2Stop lossToo tight and ordinary volatility takes you out of positions that were fine. Too wide and one bad entry costs what several good ones made.
- 3Trailing stopProtects a gain that already happened. The trade-off is that a tight trail converts a large move into a medium one; a loose trail sometimes gives the whole move back.
- 4Maximum holdThe least discussed and among the most useful. A position doing nothing is capital doing nothing, and on new launches it is usually capital in something that already failed.
Screening controls and what they cost you
Screening is where a sniper earns most of its value, because the trades it prevents cost nothing to skip. But every filter you enable removes candidates, and some of those candidates would have been winners.
| Check | What it removes | What it also removes |
|---|---|---|
| Mint authority must be revoked | Tokens that can be inflated later | Launches that revoke a little later |
| Freeze authority must be revoked | Tokens that can lock your sell | Same timing caveat |
| LP burned or locked | Liquidity that can vanish | Legitimate timelocked setups, sometimes |
| Sell simulation must pass | Honeypots | Very little, this one is close to free |
| Minimum holders | Single-wallet distributions | Genuinely new launches, by definition |
| Maximum developer holding | Concentrated supply | Projects with a declared treasury |
The right-hand column is the part that never appears in marketing. A screening profile is not free safety; it is a decision about which kinds of risk you will not take, and it costs you the launches that carried that risk and worked anyway.
Limits that stop a bad day becoming a bad month
- Daily loss cap. When it trips, the day ends. This is the single most effective setting for a strategy that is still being tested.
- Maximum concurrent positions. Spreading across many at once looks like diversification and behaves like inattention.
- Maximum entries per hour. Contested periods invite volume, and volume converts directly into fee cost.
- Cooldown after consecutive failures. A run of failures usually means conditions changed, not that the next attempt will be different.
- Minimum balance floor. Prevents sweeping the wallet to the point where the next entry fails on fees.
How to tune without fooling yourself
- 1Write down the current numbers firstFill rate, average gap between quoted and actual fill, attempts per fill, and cost per filled position. Without a baseline every change feels like an improvement.
- 2Change one thingTwo changes at once produce a result you cannot attribute, which means you learned nothing and will change both again next week.
- 3Give it enough attempts to mean somethingA handful of trades is noise. The number you need is more than feels necessary and less than you will want to wait for.
- 4Judge on expectancy per attemptNot on the last win, not on win rate, and not on how it felt. Total result divided by attempts, with every fee included.
- 5Keep a reason next to every valueA setting you cannot justify is a setting somebody else chose for you, and you will not know when conditions make it wrong.
The numbers these settings act on
- Why a snipe failsWhich setting to change for which failure
- What a sniper bot costsWhere each setting shows up on the bill
- Are sniper bots profitableExpectancy per attempt, and why it is the only score
- Avoiding rug pullsWhat the screening filters are actually removing
Questions people ask
These come up in the ticket queue often enough to answer once, properly. If yours is not here, send it over and it probably ends up on this page.
There is no universal answer, because every setting is a trade between two things you want. Slippage trades price against fill rate, priority fee trades cost against position, take profit trades certainty against size. What transfers between people is the reasoning, not the number.
Key takeaways
- Every setting is a dial between two goods, which is why no universal best value exists.
- Position size silently controls slippage and fill rate; size against pool depth, not your balance.
- A fixed priority fee overpays on quiet launches and underbids on contested ones.
- All four exit controls should be attached when the position opens, not decided while watching.
- Every screening filter also removes launches that carried that risk and worked anyway.
- A daily loss cap changes the worst case, which matters more than optimising the average.