Bitcoin Forum

Sometimes the BTC/USD rate differ a lot from an exchange to another, can be several USD. If I have an account in bitfinex, can I transfer the coins to kraken and sell them there ? For example if the rate is 220 $ in bitfinex and 225 $ in kraken.

That would make sense if the price difference is significantly large.

For smaller price differences, you would actually lose trying to arbitrage. The reason being the trading fees on exchanges, withdrawal/deposit fees etc.

And there is no guarantee the price will stick to it by the time you transfer your coins from one exchange to another.

Along with this at times you will also have the price fluctuating.

Like people have mentioned , if the price difference is larger than it will work , but otherwise the trade fee's , deposit fee , withdrawal fee will take your money. And dont forget that it takes 10 minutes or so to send the money , while that's going on prices could change.

10 minutes?
more likely like almost 15 min/ 1 confirmation nowadays
block is hardly minted now

Why don't you just cash-out at 225 and buy back in at 220 on the other platform?

I have actually tried this in the past. It certainly is not profitable after all the fees cut off and being able to profit from the small differences in the price.

Yes, that is a problem. $5.00 on every bitcoin is substantial. There must be a way to work this out.

don't sure bitfinex and kraken.

but you can do it on bitstamp and lakebtc, since both two exchanges are the ripple gateway, you can transfer usd from one to the other fastly, via ripple network.  of course, you should calculate the fee carefully.

Keeping in mind the (recent) price volatility and the fees you'd be paying, it'll probably not turn out to be a profitable deal. Do your calculations carefully before going ahead.

Buy at bid and sell at ask. That helps too  ;)

Its doable, and i did this alot in the past, the reason why people are not doing it as much today is relatively small increase/decrease of the price.
I wait for large market moves and then arb between large exchanges and my local one, early in the morning, before other people get a chance to react.

I tried to buy in the cheap and sell in the expensive when the difference is big and buy in the expensive and sell in the cheap when the difference is small so no need to transfer money, only the commission is cut off. But too much time to increase/decrease the difference and there is no warranty it will happen, so it give too few money and do not worth.

Don't even try that fee for each transaction will kill the profit and made some loose the best way to do arbitrage is to wait
a huge coming then buy at the moment and if the price dropped then sell

it could be possible with faster coins confirmations, to play with the arbitrage thing, not certainly with bitcoin

The easy way to do it is , get coins to one exchange where you think is high and get cash deposit to another and when you are ready wait for a good arbitrage opportunity and just sell at high and withdraw and by at cheap and withdraw ;)
But to make good profit , you will have to go with little good amount and look out for pretty nice difference , somtime it is even 8$

Right now is possible to buy at www.btc-e.com at price $237.3 per bitcoin and sell in www.vircurex.com at price $261 per bitcoin. it is a big diference but I still think it is not profitable long term.

That is not possible , vircurex is a small exchange as you can see there volume is 0.02 btc
How do you plan to sell it ?
You won't make profit but loss on such small trade

One could sell more than 0.2 btc bellow $261 and still is a good difference, but not too much to sell. You are right, this is one reason why I think it is not profitable.

If we look at it! suppose we buy btc at 240$ on btc-e.com and then get that 1 btc to vircurex.com
as per now Buy orders you can sell 0.818 btc for 204$
so you are left with 0.18 btc which you can withdraw and sell for 43$ at rate of 240$
so now you have total of 247$ (204 + 43)
when you withdraw a little fees is charged i.e. 0.002 btc which is 20x the normal transaction fee
so about 6$ profit for so much work with no gaurantee
Good luck if you want to do it :)

Though i like their interest policy , 15% interest(out of the trade fees)  to everyone with atleast 1 btc every 6 hours

I already tried that, and too buy and sell when the difference is big and do the opposite when the difference is small to avoid transfer money between exchanges. I already tried to buy bitcoin with litecoin, use the bitcoins to buy dollars and use the dollars to buy litecoin in the same exchange if the prices allow profit. I used a robot and neither of these strategies gave profit enough that worth.

To really make profit out of arbitrage , you will have to put small order's on little exchange's on stable alt's like DOGE , BTC ain't gonna give you good profit with small volume

This is an interesting topic as I was looking into trading signals or arbitrage strategies in Bitcoin. I may have posted this a while ago but there is a research team that predicted Bitcoin will trade below $200. They will begin sending trade alerts on 24 Feb, I wonder if they have any Arbitrage strategies as well. Let me know what you think guys, they are into all kind of stuff, https://www.ddmarkets.com/selected-trade-alerts-packages/

Wow! a paid alert service
Why would someone use it ? :-\

YOu can get a nice table regarding the prices and volume, high/low etc from here (http://bitcoinpricelab.com) and the best part is that it is free and moreover I am working with my developer to push out new exchanges and other features.

Now that is good and exactly why i was saying why pay
Anyways real thanks Bitcoin Explorer , the site is pretty decent and updated :)

Well, thats exactly what i wnt to do, make a nice platform for all info regarding bitcoin trading and tools to help traders. Im open to advice on new features, admin@bitcoinpricelab.com and we can discuss.
Thanks

No need to ping you , just a little advice , i know it's just bitcoinpricelab but adding often used currencies tab like DOGE and LTC might be usefull
Thank you once again
I will let you know if i find anything worth correction :)

I remember the times when there were 50-100$ price differences... good times..  :D

What time was that?
I never used to trade before.
I started it soon .
late than never

When the bitcoin was 700-1000$

good ! i missed those times

Well, my primary focus is to have all info regarding bitcoin, which has not yet been done. But in the coming few weeks, or maybe in late March, I'll have that done. I'm a bit busy nowadays with other projects.

The best method is to wait a huge demand the sell , and a huge bid then buy

Probably the only method that worth but such market conditions happens only few times, so is too much money for little profit, considering arbitrage and bitcoin in general a risk investment and the little profit is more valuable invest in anything more conservative.
It is just my opinion. To be worth invest in arbitrage, it should give a considerable percentage of profit.

doesnt have to give a great percentage , all you need is a big sum of money , but then again you probably shouldnt need more money..

Whatever big or small sum of money there are some better investments than arbitrage so arbitrage do not worth.

And in the end you inevitably end up burned when those obscure exchanges get hacked (or just turn into a scam on their own), and your money is wasted. Not worth it, too much risk with too little profit.

if you want to do arbit, you might be interested in making a large transfer since they have a high fee. Something like 5-10k to buy 15-30btc on a 7$ price difference gives you a good profit that covers the difference

The higher the amount you arbitrage the higher is the profit. It's that simple, but has many complications

Yeah would love to see that
Anyways , thanks again , really love the site and the difference in hitbtc and btce :D :D

Hehe, The fees also do matter. I might ad a auto or semi auto fee calculator soon.
Will keep you updated(since you liked it)
suggest literally anything and I'll try to get my developer to do it

Just saw , Gross profit calculator have been added.
This really makes it quite easy and yes i like it !
You shall make a Separate thread for your site and am sure , that will be useful for many.
BTW , would love a chart for each exchange , like we click or hover over the exchange name and can see the exchange rate chart.

I didn't get a clear idea of what you mentioned. Pleas elaborate. Also, next week, new exchanges will be added, and new charts are being discussed but we need a powerful server so im looking for a way to monetize the website to fund the server partially. Moreover, i dont want many charts because they are client sided(javascript) and will cause yourr computer to lagg.

What i mean is , it would be pretty nice to have those BTC/USD rate charts too though they might lag the System but alternative way is to make them on different tab , so one can see the charts of all exchanges on a different place altogether.

And yes! you should Monetize your site.

though we're getting quite a fair amount of views, im still not focusing on it. Im looking for a couple of guys to work as a team maybe. After the third week of march, I'll buckle up and start full swing promotions of BitcoinPriceLab and also, try to make $70 for server costs.
we have a chart page already, bitcoinpricelab.com/charts

Idk how i overlooked it , thank you
What type of guys are you looking for your team?
Any particular skills ?

Glad to know you're interested, please let me know what all skills you got. But before that, I think we are going too off topic, so we'd rather communicate via PM  or skype or mail,
skype:aristo.studio
mail:admin@bitcoinpricelab.com

I would love to have you on my team in any aspect. :D
Cheers

I would love to though i don't really have any good skills
I will message the details in PM

There are many risks with arbitrage. Its risky business but can make big profits aswell as big losses. Each site you using for arbitrage can dissapear in matter of hours or be hacked. With your money lost.

But the question here is the risk of arbitrage. Arbitrage I'd risky and is better to have money in both exchanges already.,

I think arbitrage is too risky and will end up in losing money because of fees. Today, with high-speed trading, arbitrage opportunities last only for a few milliseconds seconds in widely traded markets. Arbitrage opportunities in the commodity futures market last for very short periods.

Yeah I recently read about arbitrage in the stock markets, and it lasts literally for seconds, but for Bitcoin, the time frame is better. So it might be risky but is definitely profitable

I've been doing this, it works, and it is profitable. The real problem is when an exchange doesn't fulfill your withdrawal request at once but withholds your coins (or doesn't deposit the money after the transaction is confirmed on the blockchain). Also, btc transactions are frustratingly slow, and you can end up waiting for half an hour for your transaction to get confirmed first.

This can be tackled with money being deposited in both the exchanges.

I know this, but why restrain yourself to trading in just two exchanges? Besides that, this way you will be losing some of your profits (as well as constraining your losses if something goes wrong, e.g. the market sentiment suddenly changes).

Vircurex usd/btc is a dead pair, you cant deposit USD on there anymore last time i checked, think the volume is almost nothing.

Try this site : http://bitcoinpricelab.com/

Right now there is a arbitrage opportunity of 14$ between HitBTC (https://hitbtc.com/) and btc-e (https://btc-e.com/)
~Good luck ;)

Are you still able to trade USD with HitBTC ? We need practical insight rather than theoretical  ;)

Thanks for using bitcoinpricelab
I've noticed that HitBTC always has the highest price

Though i haven't use them so far but seems they do have a USD/BTC market


Thanks for providing such a good site
Yes! always

Why do you think that always happens?

They have the market but Funding / Withdrawal availability is different matter  :-\

Still many people making 10%/month with arbitrage ?

It depends on the sum invested. With 3-5 bitcoins you could easily reach as far as 1% per day (and then reach a little farther if fortune smiles on you). With bigger sums it becomes a lot trickier, though. You just can't dump, say, 20 btc without affecting the price significantly in the process at an exchange where the whole order-book may be lower than that amount.

If you have $20k and you deposit 10k in two exchanges which usually have high margin of ~$10 toy van make quite a lot of money

That's exactly how quick money are being made. I'm sure some people are arbitraging right now, but this boils down to liquidity and when the difference is somewhere in the range between $3-5 it's difficult to tell what will be worth it.

Yes! that really depends on the amount and seeing the fees and all it appears less than $10k aren't good enough.

Actually i think that happens because people prefer different exchange's .
for instance , HitBTC provides good service to keep your funds to be usable or just dormant.
They also have a little smaller trades as compared to btc-e and Hitbtc not only have different rates for Usd/Btc but doge/Btc is lower than all other exchanges at all times too

Preference  ::)

Much simple, isn't it? Just remember MtGox.

Basic rule:
High price when it is difficult to withdraw fiat.
Low price when the bitcoin is difficult to send out.

For HitBtc just the former case  :P

Thanks for the answer, that makes sense :D