Work it out with your own numbers

APY assumes every payout goes straight back to work at the same rate for a full year. Where that does not happen, the bigger number is a projection rather than a payment.

This is the arithmetic of compounding and nothing else. It does not know whether the rate holds for a year, whether the rewards compound without you claiming them, or who is paying. Where yield comes from is the question that decides whether the number means anything.

A two-sided pool sells whatever is going up, the whole way up. That keeps the sides balanced and leaves you with less of the winner than if you had done nothing.

It is called impermanent because it closes if the price comes back. Withdraw while it has not, and you have simply paid it. The figure ignores the fees you earn, which is the other half — and the only half that gets advertised.

Costs are charged whether you were right or wrong. Together they set the return you must produce before any skill shows up in the result at all.

Costs scale with activity. Judgement does not. Trading twenty times as often multiplies the first number twenty times over and leaves the second one exactly where it was.

Losses and gains are not symmetrical, and the gap widens fast. This is arithmetic, not a claim about any market.

This is why position size is the decision that survives being wrong, and why the size of the worst loss matters more than the number of good ones.

The same fee is trivial on a large transfer and most of the value on a small one. The number that matters is never the fee on its own.

Network fees change with how busy a chain is, and they do not scale with the amount you send — which is why the same transfer can be sensible at one size and absurd at another. Fees and confirmations explains what sets them.