I've recently started day trading. I'm just in it for fun, I probably won't be making profits so I'm using very small sums of money. I've been doing a bit of research about day trading, and it seems like it's all about bots now. In a 2025 study, students at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business found that HFMMs account for 68% of all limit order volume on Binance, Coinbase, and Bybit. This is a 42% increase from 2022. HFMMs are highly precise, and operate on the millisecond scale. Because of all this high speed trading, network speed matters a lot too. I found a report that showed that traders using premium APIs with faster speeds achieve 12 - 18% higher win rates compared to normal traders. HFMMs take advantage of tiny fluctuations to make profits. Yet another study showed that opportunities longer than 500 milliseconds were capture by HFMMs 92% of the time. The maker-taker fee model also incentivizes HFMMs to spam flood order books with limit orders, just to earn fee rebates. In 2024 73% of "maker" orders on Binance were canceled within 100 milliseconds. I feel like this is kind of pointless, there are tons of bots going around making high speed trades and spamming orders, forcing other traders to rely on bots so they don't lose profits. It's led to a race to develop better, faster, more accurate bots to gain an edge in the market. On the other hand, this is a great opportunity for devs. As Mark Twain said, "When everyone is looking for gold, it’s a good time to be in the pick and shovel business."