Bitcoin Forum

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a trading bot that will monitor 3 different currencies that all trade against each other and will be able to spot short term gains. 

For example, BTC/USD, BTC/ETH, ETH/USD.  If I was holding $100 USD and sold it for BTC, then immediately sold the BTC for ETH, and finally sold the ETH back into USD and ended up with $101 USD (1% gain).  As the 3 individual markets move, there are bound to be quick (milliseconds) opportunities to do this.  This would obviously be something that only a bot could do. 

Has anyone ever seen something like this?

I would not expect such bot to make you much profit nowadays. This triangular arbitrage must be very profitable for exchanges themselves. And i bet they have own bots to do this faster then you could and without fees.
At least to me it looks like there are not many arbing opportunities within one exchange.

Makes sense that the exchanges themselves would seize this opportunity.  It would be interesting to try with a fairly small sum on different exchanges though.

even if they didn't, its likely there would be several such bots operated by different traders. In that case the speed of the bot and total volume traded by such user (as exchanges have much lower fee for large volume traders than for small fish) lower the fee, the tinier arbitrage opportunities they can skim for profit.

but i may be wrong and cryptomarkets are not yet that efficient as i think they are. So it may be still worth trying,

The problem is that when prices are changing dramatically enough for there to be these big differences between exchanges, the exchanges tend to be barely functional.  There a lot of complaints here about dealing with even Coinbase or Bitstamp when fiat is involved, and when it isn't you either have to deal with low liquidity or accept near zero returns.

If people could do it really quickly, there wouldn't be these mad >$100 differences between exchanges half of the time.

The idea would be to exploit the opportunity on the same exchange platform so that the BTC/USD/ETH would all be part of the same account and there would not be a need to transfer these between exchanges.

Why waste time with a not? You can buy alt coins and make mad profits by holding. Just takes patience

I dont trust bot, the odds of it screwing everything up is not a risk I'm willing to take

I'd say avoid it, but that's just me

a section of my personal bot is dedicated to this. and let me tell you that you can only wish for 1% gain in your dreams :D
the best thing you can get is a 0.05-0.1% after the 3 times trading fees you are going to pay and then that will only be possible if
* you have a super high speed internet
* the exchange servers are super high speed at answering you with a good latency
* someone else doesn't fill that order before you.

in short there won't be enough opportunities and if there were they will vanish quickly and are not worth the risk.
you can earn a lot more by normal trading with a lot less risk while spending the same amount of time and effort.

I think the term is "triangular arbitrage", yes there are triangular arbitrage bots, they are difficult to make there is a lot of competition but its possible.