on stocks, im not able to give you an exact answer, as i specifically avoid small caps & m not subscribed to depth. algo market maker games will be extremely bad. a sh*t ton of ticks. if you go odd lot, even worse. ideally, i would use ladders to see dom on all exchanges on something like TT's x trader, if i were daytrading stocks
algo mm game is already bad even on a high end midcap, with decent daily volume. here is a fresh example today. please correct if wrong. look at the highlighted time & sales. it looks to me that the algo mm saw a buy stop 500 shares @ ~103.94 (today's high), "fired up"/ withdrew asks to fill it + some other orders near it, before "firing back down" immediately. these orders are in the vicinity of a recent swing high. in my understanding, the algo mm seems to be able to "see/read" the order book to play such games. this is where & how the "unfair" money is made in stocks
on futures, slippage only happens at obvious stop loss / volume void locations. i've seen 3ticks slippage on 6J, 5mins into US open with no news, at an obvious stop loss location. slippage is generally not a concern for futures, except around high impact news & crisis enviros
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i would trade patterns on both futures & stocks. after all, we are traders trading other traders. & fear & greed shows up in any asset