Bitcoin Forum

Are there any actual arbitrage bots that work?

I am also searching for a simple one.I heard Butterbot is good but seems complex.

No.

The spread are too tight across exchanges for arbitrage to work because trading fees would eat up your profit.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=699558.msg7988908#msg7988908

look this, there is a man who is making a arb bots for bitfinex, lakebtc and btc-e

i think he is talking about the classic arbitrage between exchanges.

Take it from someone who has an arbitrage bot: the risk is higher than it should be. At least when doing USD->BTC->Alt Coin->BTC->USD, I did all the hard work of computing the nuances, and transaction times coupled with some exchanges' arbitrary measures make some arbitrage opportunities disappear altogether.

What's more, there aren't as many arbitrage opportunities as it may seem, at least not in my tests. I hope to be wrong, because it would be very attractive to have successful automatic arbitrage.

Perhaps it could work just fine in some cases which I haven't yet considered. So far, my own experience has been sub-par.

For arbitrage you should have got altcoins (ex. LTC) and mastercoins (ex. BTC) on some exchanges. For example: 1 BTC, 100 LTC on Cryptsy and 1 BTC, 100 LTC on Btc-e. If exchanges rates are difference   you should buy some LTC on one exchange and sell LTC on another exchange.
You need to align the balance on the exchanges once a day or a week. For monitoring price on the different exchanges you can use https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=715620.0 open source project.

If such bot exists, I doubt anyone will share it for free.

OmarBessa: what language are you using for coding? I use java and I'm looking for a collab.

Go and try butterbots, i was told it works.

All arb bots really have very little chances of actually working as the spread between exchanges is generally less then 2x the average trading fee (you need to pay one fee to buy and one fee to sell). Not only this but you would also need to wait for confirmations to be able to use your recently bought and deposited bitcoin, making you chances of profiting less. If you did not want to wait for confirmations then you would need to employ 2x the capital (and get 1/2 the return after accounting for fees).

Back when mtgox was around arbs were easy.

Not really. When Gox was still around, the price on Gox was much higher then other exchanges, but it was very difficult to get fiat money out of Gox (it took a long time) as a result people would cancel their withdrawal request from Gox, buy BTC back with their fiat balance and transfer the BTC to another exchange to sell on.

Gox themselves had "arbitrage" bots, aka pumping bots that inflated the Bitcoin price so much. Right now, I can't seem to find any arbitrage opportunities apart from Stellar, so I'm doing that.

daybyter: I'm using C#. (Sorry for the delay, I'll have to configure this to notify me) :)

Ok, I'm using java, Not too far away from c#.

Arbitrage opportunities appear lacking because there are arbitragers already in the game.

The opportunities are less because the market has gotten more efficient. There are enough big players who have money in accounts at the major exchanges and when they want to buy or sell they will use the exchange with the best price.

At the moment i haven't seen any spreads with volume worth trading. My arb bot has been sitting idle for a few months now.

absolutely no one will ever share it for free
there is no free for lunch

I did spend some time trying to 'perfect' a bot for trading inter-exchange arbitrage.
Although as stated previously it is uncommon, it does occur and at spreads that are profitable. The main problem with trying to trade arbitrage is that you are in a race with every other arbitrage bot out there to make the trade 1st and unfortunately the main factor that will affect this is your ping to the exchange compared to everyone else. This is why large investment firms pay millions to be located as near to the exchange as possible.
Add to that bot's that are set up to try and trick arbitrage bots and you find your writing more code to avoid or escape from trades than complete them.
These reasons are why my trading platform no longer has an arbitrage bot.

But at the same time, it's hard to find a good business model. So it's hard to share it at all.

Sharing techniques for finding spreads, and details of previous experiences that are no longer available to trade doesn't harm anyone though.

I did that with my screenshots...

A friend of mine used the famous Butter Bot.From his experience there are still problems with the bot.It's actually not totally reliable.There are limitations.

Bots are still in their infancy.But they will get good and accurate soon.

Whats with bitcoin-trader.biz? Is this a scam or what? Some says it's just a ponzi scheme?

Guys, I'm currently developing a cloud bot which supports an inter-exchange arbitrage (at the btc-e example). It's totally cloud-based, which means that you administrate it via the client admin panel, but your own bot process runs on the GoDaddy dedicated server. What's more, you can fully control it: manually start or kill your bot process on the server, get real-time logs, change trading strategy. Now I'm involved in tests & fixes to advance it's built-in strategies and in further development to make it perform custom strategies using simple formulas on basic variables, such as volume delta (time period, abs or rel), price delta (time period, abs or rel).
Cheers

What language are you using?

There claims seem pretty unreasonable and they market it like a HYIP.

As far as I heard,all available arbitrage bots are still complex to use and in their infancy.They are okay for highly experienced trader but not for beginners.You have to learn to use them properly before going on board.

This is not necessarily true, many are no longer in their infancy.

I do agree that anybody considering using a bot to trade for them should learn how to properly use it, back test it, and fully understand what it does prior to putting any real money behind it - or better yet hire someone who does know what they are doing.

I'm always interested in a collab to develop such a bot.