Gas, Slippage, Uniswap
Here I outline good practices for gas settings and slippage, as well as describe trading tokens through Uniswap (as it has a few idiosyncrasies)
Gas and slippage are the main two things to be cognizant of when trading through Uniswap.
If operating Phoebe in the Consortium, you can simply allow the bot to use automatic gas estimates. If you prefer, specific gas settings can be set in the setup menu. At default, Phoebe is set to normal transactions, but can also be configured to operate with flashbots. This can be changed in Phoebe's setup menu. There's several options when configuring gas with Phoebe:
left blank to be automatic/market price
filled with a % to be auto + x% (eg. 50% would be auto gas + 50% extra)
filled as (maxfee,priority) if you would like a fixed gas amount per transaction.
eg. (250%,50) as a gas setting in Phoebe: this gives a floating range on the max fee side (250% of current market estimate) , while using a fixed fee of 50 for the priority.
When not buying/selling within the Consortium, it is ideal to use Metamask's advanced gas controls to manually pre-set gas, as every second counts. I tend to always have priority fee be 5, and max fee set to at least 80. This will help guarantee you fast entry into a token. To preset your gas, click the top right of your Metamask window, navigate to settings -> experimental -> Enable Enhanced Gas Fee UI. Then begin to send a transaction for 0eth to any wallet, press edit -> advanced -> 80 max fee, 5 priority (or anything) -> select "always use these values and advanced setting as default". You can back out, cancel the tx, and those settings will be your default gas settings until edited.
Slippage relates to the amount a token can move in price (from other peoples buys/sells), while still allowing your buy/sell to go through. It’s also about accounting for buy/sell taxes on shitcoins. If its too low, and someone else is buying or selling, your transaction could fail because of the price change.
So when actually purchasing a shitcoin, you need to set your slippage as well as boost your gas (if you want less chance of transaction failure). I tend to keep my slippage at 49%, unless purchasing a token I know to have taxes lower than 3% (with those, I’ll lower it to not get sandwiched). This way, I almost never have failed transactions buying something.
To adjust your default slippage in Consortium, go to Phoebe's setup menu and assign it. If using Uniswap, click the settings wheel in the top right as you can see in the image below and replace slippage with the number you would like.
It's important to understand that on larger tokens with lower taxes (0-5%), using high slippage may get you "sandwiched". For these types of tokens, it is crucial to adjust slippage and bring it down from 49% to something closer to 0-5% if possible. To check token taxes, head to the links page and follow through to honeypot, or tokensniffer (Consortium alerts will soon report taxes, honeypot status, and more directly)
Another thing to note is that sometimes Metamask wont pop up for a buy or sale unless you change the last few digits of the quantity of token that you are trading. So once you enter the ETH amount you want to buy or sell on Uniswap, make sure to change the last 3 digits of the other tokens quantity to random numbers for your transaction to prompt Metamask to show up.
