i stopped trusting pre-market volume numbers

been doing this a long time. used to scalp opens, now i mostly sit on gap setups and wait. my whole process starts the night before. i pull a list, i mark levels, i go to bed. morning is just execution. no scanning at 9:28, that's how you end up chasing. the thing that changed for me was pre-market volume. i used to size off it. thin tape, wide spread, but the number said decent volume so i figured there was real interest. got burned enough times to look closer. turns out depending on where the numbers come from you're not seeing the same thing. some feeds show a lot more early prints than others. odd lots, dark prints reported late, timestamps that don't line up. so the same symbol at the same minute can look like two different stocks. now i don't size off the volume figure at all. i watch spread and how fast the bid refreshes. if the spread is a nickel wide on a five dollar stock i don't care what the volume says, i'm not there. curious what other people use as a liquidity read before the bell. i'm using spread plus how deep the book looks and that's basically it. feels crude. probably is. anyone tracking something better.