Bitcoin Forum

Is it practical to trade profitably on the arbitrage between  btc/usd / btc/eur price against  usd/eur  price?
For example if the USD/EUR exchange rate is 1.22 and the BTC/USD / BTC/EUR exchange rate is 1.266 can you make profit on that?

There have been some very juicy arbitrage opportunities over the past month or so:
 - http://nyse-group.de/bitcoin-arbitrage

But it has been very hard to move funds in and out of the exchanges.  Here's an attempt to automate arb that ended up shutting down:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74291.msg981888#msg981888

So if you are having to wire transfer the funds you have to work with large amounts to justify the fees.  And even if you have a strategy that works on paper, .. it will seem to fail when your order on one exchange goes through, and then you find the connection to the other become disconnected and no response -- giving heart palpitations as you get stuck exposed as volatility has its way with your unbalanced trade.

But at the levels we have right now, the opportunities are definitely enticing.

There might be ways to move the cash around also thanks to TransferWise and CurrencyFair.

Arbitrage is one of the easiest ways to make money in the bitcoin economy atm...

I've been attempting arbitrage between BTC/USD on the different exchanges, but being primarily a non-US citizen, I'm severely limited to only a few exchanges (btcex and btc-e together with Gox), the largest factor being the transaction fees.