Size a Monad swap so the fee is smaller than the move you need

The size on the chip is the only number most people choose, and it is the wrong one to choose first. The target you set, the stop you set, and the gas the chain will bill are already numbers. A clip is the right size when the money you need the market to give you is larger than the money the round trip will take even if the price does not move. If it is not, you are paying to hold a coin you will have to sell back through the same fee.

Write the target in MON, not in percent

The exit row offers +1.6, +2.4 and +3.5 percent. On 50 MON those are 0.80, 1.20 and 1.75 MON. On 10 MON they are 0.16, 0.24 and 0.35 MON. On 100 MON they are 1.60, 2.40 and 3.50 MON. The percent looks the same on every chip. The MON does not. A fee that is noise on 100 MON is the whole target on 10 MON. Convert before you tap.

The stop works the same way, in the other direction. −0.8 percent of 50 MON is 0.40 MON. −1.1 percent is 0.55 MON. If the round trip already costs more than the stop, the stop cannot save you. You will be through it on the way in, before any adverse move, and the card will be red for a reason that is arithmetic.

A percent is a ratio. The bill is in MON. Compare them in MON.

The bill has three lines, and only one of them is gas

Line one is the pool fee, paid in the swap, both ways. A 0.05 percent tier, the 500 fee on a v3 pool, takes 0.025 MON of a 50 MON clip on the way in and about the same on the way out. That is 0.05 MON before you have paid the chain. A 0.01 percent tier is a fifth of that. A 1 percent tier is twenty times the 500 tier and will swallow a 1.6 percent target on its own. Read the tier on the pool. Do not assume the card’s asset is in the cheap one.

Line two is gas, and Monad bills the gas you used, priced from the base fee plus your tip. The sell this desk signs uses a limit of 350,000 gas when the coin is in the wallet, and 550,000 when the vault’s agent sells. At a 100 gwei base fee and no tip, 350,000 gas is 0.035 MON and 550,000 gas is 0.055 MON. The entry is a similar size. A wallet round trip at those limits, if both actually used the whole limit, would be about 0.07 MON. They will not use the whole limit. The receipt’s gas used is the bill. The limit is the ceiling you must be able to pay if the block is full of expensive work. Hold the ceiling in your head. Pay the receipt.

Line three is slippage, which is not a fee until the price moves. The close will accept 99 percent of the mark on the card. On a 49.68 MON mark the floor is about 49.18 MON, so you have allowed up to half a MON of movement. You do not pay that half unless the pool actually moves. You do pay it, all of it, if someone trades through the price between your read and your inclusion. On a 50 MON clip in a deep WETH or WBTC pool that move is usually ticks, not half a MON. On a thin pool it is the trade.

Three clips, the same target

Take +1.6 percent and a 500-tier pool, and use 0.04 MON as a honest round-trip gas figure, under the limits, at the floor. On 10 MON the target is 0.16 MON. Fees both ways are about 0.01 MON. Gas is 0.04 MON. You need the market to pay 0.05 MON before you have a profit, which is a third of the target. The trade can work. It cannot work if you also eat a few tenths of slippage. Prefer a deeper pool, or a larger clip, or do not take the 10 MON size for a 1.6 percent idea.

On 50 MON the target is 0.80 MON. Fees are about 0.05 MON. Gas is still about 0.04 MON. The fixed cost is near 0.09 MON, about a ninth of the target. That is why the cards you have been closing were 50 MON. The size is large enough that the bill is not the thesis, and small enough that a deep BTC or ETH pool does not jump when you arrive. On 100 MON the target is 1.60 and the same gas is a rounding error, but the pool moves more and the one percent floor is a full MON of permission. Size up only when you have watched that pool take 100 MON without walking the price by more than you are willing to leave on the table.

What not to do with the chip

Do not raise the size because a smaller one failed to quote. A missing quote is a price read, not a dare. Do not cut the size to “try one” if the try is smaller than the bill. Do not ignore a vault that is empty and a wallet that is not: the size has to sit where the signature will spend it. And do not treat the target as a promise the desk is making. It is the line at which the auto path, if you turned it on, would try to leave. You can leave earlier. The size should still make sense if you leave at the stop.

A one-minute check before Enter

Write the clip in MON. Multiply by the target percent and by the stop percent. Add a pool fee for two swaps and a gas figure of about 0.04 MON for a wallet round trip, or about 0.06 if the agent is signing the larger limits. If the stop MON is smaller than that sum, pick a different size or a different stop. If the target MON is only barely larger, you need the market to do all the work and the pool to do none. That is a bet. Call it one. Then tap Enter once.