Bitcoin Forum

Hello, guys!
I am in the crypto industry relatively recently, it is interesting to know / understand how trading of crypto-currencies / tokens on different exchanges operates.

Wich problems and disadvantages do you encounter when trading with crypto currency?
What currency pairs do you use (more convenient and practical in terms of output / input to exchange)?
How much can you earn on arbitrage?

I will be grateful for the answers.

The disadvantage of doing arbitrage is you need to wait some minutes to transfer your coins and more possibly when it comes the price on that exchange also dumps already.
How can you earn and how much you can earn is depending on the coins and capital that you have.

if you are "relatively new" to this market then it is best to stick to normal ways of trading instead of trying other weird methods and complicated ones such as arbitrage. because for example one of the things you will need in arbitrage (in my opinion) is a fast bot with a good internet connection so that you can act fast on opportunities before someone else does in your stead.

the usual way of trading, buy low and sell high, is much easier and it is even more profitable when you learn it. there is no reason for using arbitrage with all its risks to earn a small amount of profit.

You should really have a lot of money to make arbitrage

Not really, you need to have a lot of money to earn a lot of money from arbitrage, I would suggest to do with bitcoin, as simply by checking the current wall price and doing speculation, selling high, buying low.

But it is difficult to transfer money from one exchange to another. You need money for each exchange to trade

actually it is very easy to do the trade for cyptocurrency,
all that you need to do is buy and sell,before doing any trade you need to find your output and input.
you should find the place for you to deposit your cash/fiat/money and then convert it to cryptocurrency.
after that find the place for you to encash your cryptocurrency.
usually,the place for you to deposit your money is the place for you to encash your cryptocurrency.

the advantage doing a trade in cryptocurrency on exchanger is some of them does not require our document to do the trade,
and it's very easy to send your money/cryptos,and you can keep yourself in secret.

the disadvantage doing a trade in cryptocurrency on exchanger is a lot of phising attempt will happen when you try to do it,
and the most important thing is it's irreversible.
whenever you or not you send your cryptos to other wallet,you will never can reverse it back or forever move to that wallet.

arbitrage is not easy as you think,
you need a lot of money at least to do it,and momentum.
a lot of people doing an arbitrage but most of them did not get profit from it but instead loss.
because it's require a confirmation for every transaction and some of them will be delivered after a hour or more than that.
in cryptocurrency in the next 5 minutes the price can change higher or lower.

To do arbitrage successfully you cannot wait for transactions to get from one exchange to the other. Arbitrage opportunities are only fleeting and you have to act immediately. To do this you need to have equal amounts of each currency on each exchange so you can go long on one and short on the other. Then you can move the funds after you flatten the trade.

Thank you very much for your the detailed answer!

Thank you, guys.
You helped me to understand this questions.
It is really need to think and weigh the advantages and disadvantages.

This solution is good enough except on thing - you should have much money :) If you want to have good profit you should operate with big funds. But you can't have big funds on every exchange and on each crypto currency. And you can lose when you will withdraw all funds at some time. It's risky.

Well yes, you do need to have sufficient funds available, arbitrage is more of a professional strategy than one for beginners. That doesn't make it impossible to do. As for losing when you come to withdraw, that depends whether you got the strategy right in the first place. You need to factor in the trading fees and transactions fees before deciding that there is enough of a price difference to make it worthwhile. If you do all correctly it is one of the least risky trading strategies there is as you are short and long the position simultaneously and therefore perfectly hedged. This means that movements in the overall market will not affect you. As the price comes back together, your profit in one account will outweigh the loss in the other every time. The only risk is in execution error.

The real difficulty with trying to do abitrage in the crypto space is that the markets are open 24/7 but you can only move fiat to an exchange 5 days a week in banking hours.

So you have to pre-plan by having your fiat there already, but that is risky given how often the exchanges are hacked.

The largest difficult with arbitrage is that the markets can change in the time it takes you to transfer from one exchange to another. Therefore the best way is to ensure that you are already holding the currency you want to profit from arbitrage with. For example, hold both btc and ether on two accounts so you can instantly buy on one and instantly sell on the other.

You should try reading the thread before commenting. I already explained the only way to do arbitrage is to be holding enough of each currency in both accounts. Then you can transfer the funds at your leisure after the trade is closed. Anyway if you're trading a fiat pair you can transfer USDT 24/7.

I listened about the arbitraging in the stock market but found it is not realistic now a days because of speedness of market and on-line operation. If, anybody know about the arbitraging in the cryptocurrency then send the details here. Arbitraging means buying and selling the same assets simultaneously.  Also, i want to know that should we buy the cryptocoin from one country and sell it in another country instantly. If it happen here also we can earn a good and decent amount of profit.

First, what is your coin you want to play arbitrage? For example you want to play ETH . Go to coin market cap. Go to "MARKET" section. Look for the exchange site that gives the lowest value of ETH. Register to that exchange site, and buy an ETH.

So you purchased a low priced ETH. Now go to coinmarketcap again. Look for the exchange site that gives the highest ETH price. Send your ETH to that exchange site. Presto you just earn thru Arbitrage.

Arbitrage is just taking advantage of the difference in prices among different exchanges, that is all the issue is that arbitrage needs a accounts in all the important exchanges, you need the be verified to move a lot of money, you need a lot of money, and you need to act fast, arbitrage opportunities only last for a few minutes and as such you will need to be in front of the screen 24/7 to make any profit.

And you need to consider the percentage of commission that the exchange takes for its services. I tried to do this with one coin, but I did not succeed. I lost money

Yes before doing arbitrage you must check all the requirements first of the exchanger so that you know what will happen if you send some coin to the exchanger. Arbitrage is a risky but profitable method in trading in this way we need to be fast or else you will missed the profit or you will be loss.

A very good discussion on this topic ensued from a very general question.  One responder got the most important part of the formula - i.e. that you need equal values on each exchange so that you can go long/short simultaneously.  However, you still need a way to "return" funds to the starting point in order to repeat - this is typically done at a loss, which obviously needs to be less than your gain.  Another important consideration is that you will need to hold a certain value of crypto currencies at all times - your investment in those holdings will be subject to market price fluctuations - this is not necessarily bad, but it is a risk you need to be aware of.  In general though I would not recommend doing this without a well thought-through strategy and the ability to take a risk on a portion of your investment.  Lastly, be aware that the exchanges are not as secure as banks.  BTCE is a recent example of this peril.

actually doing arbitration also has advantages and disadvantages, the advantage is we can choose a market that has a higher price freely, and also the disadvantage is that if we do arbitration we need a lot of time to wait for confirmation of the transfer of tokens we have, it can make we lose money if the price wastes before our tokens are confirmed.

Yes, it is really difficult to understand all info about trading wright now, but thank you for this advices. I appreciate it.

This case was discussed. There're hint to keep same balance on all exchanges. So, you may trade instantly without actual transfer. Transfer can be made later without time losing.

That's solid advice was was exactly the way I was thinking of doing it, if you plan to arbitrage.

The definition of arbitrage is simultaneously trading the same asset at two or more different exchanges. Before starting an arbitrage you need to make sure you have the asset you are trading on both exchanges + a stack of ETH or BTC on both exchanges.

Perfect example:

1. KNC is trading on binance at 0.2, and also trading on Liqui at 0.1 per KNC
2. Sell 1000 KNC on Binance @0.2 for 200
3. Buy 1000 KNC on Liqui @0.1 for 100 ---> You end up with the same ammount of KNC and a PROFIT of 100 (- trading fees)

The difference will never be this big as this is a perfect example, but whenever the profit is higher than fees you pay to make these transactions, you're good to go.

True, I forgot that factor which is one of the most important ones, besides most arbitrage opportunities leave a very small margin of utility, this is why you will need a huge bankroll to make this work, and I must add that arbitrage in forex is done mostly by bots that run all the time looking for opportunities like those, so I will not be surprised if the same is already happening in bitcoin.

Arbitrage trading could be very profitable but also very risky and I mean that these days atbitrage trading is much harder to performe than before because diffrences in price on exchanger are not that big and you have to put a lot of time and effort but the result might not be that good as you expect.

This is probably where the strategy begins to fail, the costs of transactions can eat most of your earnings so you need a very big bankroll and that is going to bring attention to yourself and what you are doing, besides if an exchange decides to exit scam you then you are out of luck and then that will mean that you are never going to become profitable with this method.

Two main problems I see are
1) time taken to transfer from one exchange to the other. Prices are continually fluctuating.
2) cost of transfer. With small amount minimum charge will use any profit.

Yes these are the common problems of the trader when they are deciding to arbitrage. Arbitrage is the very risky move in the market on were you can loss anytime that's why it is better to study first if we want to enter arbitrage.

Arbitrage is an extremely profitable trading method but it is not suitable for bitcoins unless and until you have a huge investment and divided that fund in to many exchanges. I prefer ETH for my arbitraging activities. ETH transactions are usually very fast and can cope up with my expectations. The main issue you will face in arbitraging is the transaction speed between wallets. Since bitcoin transactions are not fast and takes at least 30 minutes to confirm. It makes bitcoin not suitable for arbitraging. So I mainly use ETH/USD pair for arbitraging. The earning potential is huge if your timing is right.

Some are using Bots to make automatic arbitrage between exchanges. You also need a fast internet connection. You cant earn a huge profit from small amounts. You also need to consider the BTC transfer fee between btc wallets.

Arbitrage is a very difficult method, because you have to compete with time, you have to make a right decision too quickly. Each stock market can not transfer funds quickly.

Arbitrage is profitable also and quite difficult at first. It is profitable in terms once you transfer funds/token it is must a quick transferable so you can have the time to sell it at the high price. The disdavantage is too slow to confirm the transaction when you transfer the funds.

The time taken will not be a problem if you already have a balance of both currency in both exchanges. You need to take care of transfer when the trade is done in both exchanges. If you are doing arbitrage like buying from one exchange and then sell to another because you did not buy that coin in advance then there is a possibility that you will lose if price is already down when the coin is received in another exchange. The best way is to have equal balances in both exchanges and then buy and sell simultaneously. You should also take into account the fees involved in trading and transferring and you can also profit from arbitrage if you have a bigger capital because if you have the minimum amount then your profit would just be eaten up by fees.

Bitcoin arbitrage is the buying of bitcoins on an exchange where the price is very low and selling it at an exchange where the price is relatively higher. The prices of Bitcoin vary on various exchanges, due to the fact that the markets are not directly linked, and the trading volume, on many exchanges, is low enough that the price does not adjust to the average right away.

i will say that it is difficult to earn profit at arbitrage because we need to concern about the time when the transaction was made. not all coins have fast landing at the other wallet and we need to estimate how long the coin will arrived. in my past, i've many experience from arbitrage and i can make some good profit although the risk is when the price is suddenly gets down without mercy.

but what i really need to mention here is sometimes the other wallet get disable to prevent arbitrage so we can not do arbitrage especially if the price is going to go up high.

Arbitrage is very hard for big exchanges to big exchange but if you have local exchange you can earn money by arbitrage.

True, you need to be very fast in order to capitalize from the price differences besides if you do not know about the circumstances of the differences then you may lose money, remember when the price of bitcoin went up a lot in some exchanges and that was because withdrawal of fiat were suspended, if you do arbitrage blindly you may end up in such a position.

To make successful deals on arbitrage, you have to be fast. I haven't tried it but from what I know it is profitable.

The first point is not a real problem, you are not understanding arbitrage at all, you are not waiting for an opportunity to appear and then send money to the exchange, you need to have money already on the exchange so the only thing you need to do is to make the trade, arbitrage will be impossible otherwise, this is why arbitrage is only for those that have a huge capital since the earnings tend to be in the range of 1% or 2% of the amount you traded.

Arbitrage is very difficult these days.. It is much better for people from China and Korea they have acces to all exchanges and can
take advantage of price differences.. other than that it is not profitable in general..

how much money allocated to arbitrage is the determinant of profit to be earned.
the odds for arbitrage are now very small but last week I got 0.6 BTC from arbitrage centratech results in cryptopia to binance.

For arbitrage it is essential to have funds on multiple exchanges due to the transaction times between exchanges. Before your funds arrive at the desired exchange, the arbitrage opportunity is likely to be gone. In addition, as I don't think that a human can act fast enough to earn money on arbitrage nowadays, I think a bot is needed.

Arbitrage is very difficult that is correct, but I have never understood while people do not join together and form a group of arbitrage investors, that way you do not need to have all the money, you do not need to have access to all the exchanges and if those people come from different places of the world then you will get access to exchanges that you would not have access otherwise.

Arbitrage in cryptocurrency is not fun and there are many set backs. Even if you are fast enough, you will have to  consider blockchain speed of the coin. Then what are the chances that the price won't drop when your coin arrive. If you can tackle all these obstacles then go ahead but if not stick to the normal buy low sell high style of trading. You will be alright.

the main thing you need is:

-Access to a foreign exchange

As the most common abrigrage opportunities (price differences) are present in different continents (countries), you'll need access to a second exchange (depending where you're trading from) to Japan, China, Europe, and the US. If you have access to these countries/continents you have great ways to make a handsome profit out of arbitrage. That's difficult of course, because all these countries have their own regulation and it's not as straight forward to simply open an account in one of them, you usually have to be a resident and it's unlikely that you have a nationality in all these three countries, but in theory it could be possible if you get along with a trader from one of these countries (chat, live support/email etc.)

The bitcoin is main source of income for a lot of the people the value of the bitcoin is increasing more and more.  It is now easy to buy and the most difficult to avoid the bitcoin as compare to the other curries so hold the bitcoin and be the part of the long term investment in the arbitrage so be the part huge income for the bitcoin resource.

And the problem with bots is that it needs to be perfectly programed because if it is not then you are going to lose a fortune so you will need to trust a piece of software with a great part of your capital and that is always a scary thing in my opinion especially if we take into account that websites change all the time so if something changed in the website where your bot is operating and that breaks the bot then you are in trouble.

Yes we must provide a fee large enough to be able to make fast delivery of bitcoin. That is one of the risks of arbitrage. But now I think arbitrage is not an appropriate choice because bitcoin prices in some exchanges have almost the same price. So if done in my opinion it will spend time and also can give a loss. Imagine how much fee we should pay in each arbitrage . That is why nowadays there are many people who are totally stopped to do arbitrage.

The biggest problem and problem the biggest advantage is that market is unregulated and subject to pumps and dumps and manipulation. Its a problem but its what gives the opportunity at big earnings.
To go go in and out of an exchange consider coins that are widely available, fast and cheap to transact. LTC  would be an option for me. Can enter from fiat on coinbase and is very speedy to go from exchange to exchange.
Arbitrage is difficult and you can easily get lost at low transaction speeds and fees.

I do trade bitcoin and the following altcoins often: lisk, bitconnect, Maota, and litecoin. These coins fluctuate often in poloniex and livecoin.net and you can take some advantages several times in a day if you know how to point cryptocurrencies trading opportunities. Arbitrage opportunities also exist between poloniex and most of the new exchangers platforms on most of the new listed coins.

you have to have an account at every stock exchange site to make an arbitrage, it would be better if these accounts are confirmed, there must be some money-coin in each account. you have to move quickly when it is possible to arbitrage.

You need to have money in several exchange in order to make anything substantial from this.

But that solution is risky since all the money is going to be in one side of the equation so you will need to trust your partner with all your money and your partner is going to need to do the same and when it comes to our bitcoin I think it is a mistake to trust in anyone because once those coins are out of your wallet you do not have any control over it.

Arbitrage is not for everyone guys. It requires a huge amount of capital. It's not for standard people like us. You need to have a legit account in several exchanges and you need to make them in the highes class so that you don't face withdraw problems and your limit would be high.

Yes it is for the risky traders only who are wanting to make profit because there are many pros and cons if you do arbitrage. You need more practice and money that you can lose after transferring to another exchanges.

Computation. This is most important thing to take not if you are thinking of doing arbitrage. Aside from transaction fees, you need to take note of the fees when you do a trade in that specific trading platform. You should also take note the price changes that may happen since, as we kow, our transactions can be delayed or takes long or needs a lot of confirmation.

The pairs are limited. Maybe wait for some updates. Will they add new pairs? Anyway, find something better. You can use coinmarketcap though.

If you do make arbitrage trading on altcoins then its possible but on bitcoin then it would really be hard and not totally efficient. Arbitrage trading can really make some easy money if you done it well but there are things to be considered first before you do such thing. This thing do have risk on losing money instead of earning and one of the reasons would be the fee and sudden fluctuation on prices between exchanges thats why precise timings would really be crucial.

how do you find the best arbitrage ?
so you mean have 10 ETH buy ripple with 10 eth, send ripple to the other exchange, sale ripple for ETH and get 11 eth ?
i am searching for great website alert or twitter alert on arbitrage

I did make some money on arbitrage, but it is coming with significant risks. To mitigate the risk, I found the cheapest token out there, bought it at 0.00000001 BTC, brought it to the other exchange, and sold it for ETH, than brought ETH back to BTC... 6 days and I made my money x4 times... But it was a rare opportunity I found, and also in the market with less than 50 trades across 4 different exchanges, so you can imagine...  Not something I would do daily.

how did you find the arbitrage opportunity ? is there a website ?

what are the 4 differenct exchange ?

what crypto you do that with ?

thanks

Arbitrage needs a good timing as in you closely monitor every coin that is spiking. I did it but not too often.

There are different arbitrage strategies like CROSS-MARKET arbitrage. (the same instrument is traded
on different exchanges at different prices). The idea is to catch the difference between prices.
STATISTICAL ARBITRAGE - the strategy is aimed at making profit from statistical variations in asset price
correlation. The most common statistical arbitrage is CALENDAR arbitrage. (the profit is acquired from the
price difference of futures with various fulfilment dates).
Arbitrage profit is a NO risk profit but there are many obstacles on the way so this is why Arbitrage trading is only for experienced traders.
First of all, you have to have enough funds which you spread amongst different exchanges .
You have to calculate with different trading and withdrawal fees on different exchanges, market liquidity,
time issue etc. and still  be able to  execute trades at the same time.
This is more realistic to achieve with bots and AI (artificial intelligence) involved.

I don't know if this thread is active or not but i would like to add my experience about arbitrage in general. Even though the concept of arbitrage is easy to understand you must gain experience in order to do it correctly. I am arbitraging markets for the last 7 years now and i have learned everything i know from a forum for free. Searching on google i came across a website named arbusers.com. It was(and still is) like a paradise of arbitrage talks and information. I learned everything i needed to know about arbitrage from there. Even if the site focus mostly on sport betting arbitrage, you can learn a ton of useful information about how arbitrage works, why it works and how the most successful do it. For the ones that interested to learn more you can try and check it.

Arbitration is one of the most basic and foremost ways to make money online. But there are advantages as well as disadvantages to this arbitration. Opportunities in arbitration are fleeting and you need to act immediately. The exchange currency needs to be equal.

Generating crypto by arbitrage is not as simple as we imagine, not just moving coins from one exchange to another, to get profit from the price
difference between exchanges. But it is more complex than we imagine, because it is very important to calculate withdrawal fees from exchanges.
Do not let the profits that we generate run out cut off by withdrawal fees, our calculations must be precise.

First of all, I would like to briefly define the arbitrage and then answer your questions based on my own knowledge and experience. Arbitrage is the process of buying a financial instrument from one place and selling it in another place at the same time if the price of a financial instrument is different in the markets of different countries.
 
 
The biggest problem you can encounter while arbitrage in the crypto money markets will be possible network errors, transfer delays or money transfer. For example, your transfer may not take place due to a transfer error that will occur in your preferred crypto network to make arbitrage, your transfer may be too late due to problems or the service you are using may have temporarily stopped depositing and withdrawing with that cryptocurrency. These are problems that should be considered while arbitrage and which can also be described as problems.
 
 
Anyone who knows the answer to this question does not already give it, everyone finds their arbitrage opportunities by making their own research. Although there are websites on the internet that provide this service for a fee or for free, they often disappear immediately because such opportunities are shared. For this question, the best advice I can give you is to choose services with low transaction volume and cryptocurrencies.
 
 
Just like the previous question, it is not possible to give a clear answer to this question because your earnings rate varies depending on the opportunities you will find. It is possible to get as low as 2-3% opportunities in some of your transactions, while you can gain 80-120% in some transactions. If I have to say something precisely and clearly, I would like to say that if you arbitrage really and successfully, you can even exceed the earnings of salaried personnel depending on your capital within a month.

Yes, you need to rush to catch the arbitrage opportunity but not necessarily need to have equal amount of money on exchanges. When there was only fiats times, moving your balances from one exchange to another was a big problem but after the era of stablecoins, now are moving fiats on blockchain hence you can easily catch arbitrage even if you do not maintain big balances on all your exchanges.

That must be most generalized definition of arbitrage trading. But, I do see traders are making use of arbitrage within exchange itself; they do trade like X->Y->Z->X; this is possible when one pair of trading instrument get heavily dumped/pumped. This type of arbitrage must be time saving as well because you do not need to move funds out of exchanges.

Abritraging is a great way to make money in trading if you are experienced enough as a cryptocurrency trader. However, as a newbie, you may not want to jump on arbitraging just yet. You can actually learn about the complete A to Z about arbitraging on NewsCrypto platform by taking up their online courses. Youtube videos are also helpful as well, and other platforms such as TraderCobb, Udemy, etc.

It’s kinda risky as well because transferring your BTCs to another exchange could take several minutes to almost an hour plus transaction fees. Each exchange have different prices of Bitcoin and other altcoins. Anything could happen if there is going to be a sudden dump after your transaction hash is completely validated or reached the number of required confirmations.

Before, you can do this as there's difference between exchange created by real buy orders and not just by bot. You can generate decent profits by working with price difference between exchange.


Good point, exchange also have differences between trading fees and exchange withdrawal fees, you need to calculate it to get good generated benefits.

I think in our time now?there are only few that using arbitrage trading because most of trading platform dont show actual prices (or maybe i am wrong but this is my observation)
and also the volatility of market is not that option to Give is profit in short time.
But wayback when you posted this?yeah i tried few times this arbitrage and yes i made some good profit in my trials but already stopped doing now,instead i focused in Holding or semi long term investing.

I'm trade use arbitrage technique
average I get profit 1% / day
at some moment can get 200% one day
depend on market and blockchain network
trouble is if your market has been maintenance wallet will stuck until normail again

indeed it feels very easy if we talk about arbitrage, but it is very risky if the coins that you arbitrage are coins that are slow in the transaction process, such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Gold, BCH, and BSV, because if you are late then the Dump will take over

I see this is a old thread but actually very good topic and I want to put my 2 cents of knowledge here.

You can easily overcome the problem of withdrawal fees and trading fees by using a bigger bankroll actually and yeah for arbitrage you need to have a big purse and high limits on exchange because trading $10 on arbitrage trades will result in loss overall after all fees reduction.

I agree that it is a bit more complex because the market moves pretty fast and by the time you bought a coin and then deposit it to another crypto exchange and waiting for confirmations might ruin the arbitrage possibility. I used to do this with bitcoins like an year or two ago where I would buy btc from btc-e (unfortunately now closed ) and I would sell it on other platforms with good profit but that soon stopped as the market became very liquid with the popularity bitcoins gained with time and more people jumped into trading.

I would say the biggest problem is liquidity because I have seen that there are coins that trade for higher on some exchange while lower on others but you have to keep in mind that the buy/sell orders are enough for you to buy and then quickly sell. If you notice you cannot buy lower than selling price of other exchanges. I dropped arbitrage idea after seeing even all gaps are not suitable for making use of profit making.

I mean, I remember an instance where I purchased a coin and until the time I withdrew and deposited to the higher price exchange the trades vanished and I ended up buying a coin I don't know about and I had to immediately sell it for a cheaper price and so eventually it resulted in loss so make sure when you do arbitrage trading you make sure the trade volumes are big enough and stable enough otherwise you might struggle with trades.

Not just arbitrage trading but a lot of guys do arbitrage betting as well where they would choose different winners on different sportsbook and make use of the odds discrepancy among odds provider but this is not easy to do in crypto trading actually because you would hardly find a pair of coin which you can play with and if even you find the variance would be hardly 2-5% which would be needed for withdrawal fees and depositing fees of those involved exchanges so either you have a massive amount of bitcoins to do this or you will face problems doing it.

Talking of arbitrage gambling a lot of sportsbook clearly mention that they won't support arbitrage betting and accounts would be locked once they get to know about such practices by their users. If you want to learn more you might want to read this - https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/guides/strategy/avoiding-sportsbook-restrictions-arbitrage-betting.

To earn from arbitrage is simple and easy when you get different price some coin from one exchange to other exchange, you must check first time available to deposit or withdraw from on exchange to other wallet, then you must check how long withdrawing confirmation take time because will give most important way when delay price will be the same with other exchange.

If you are too noob to know how to make a profit from arbitrage, maybe you should take it slowly first because it could cause you to lose a lot of money if you do not do a lot of checking and right calculations. If you make just a smidge of a mistake on your calculations you will end up losing money instead of profiting. But, the right way suppose to be finding difference in prices in two different places and taking advantage of that difference.

The clearest way to actually do this is to have money on two different nations local exchanges that means you can take into account of the fiat exchange rates and could make a good amount of money from those as well, change fiat to fiat, change btc to fiat and you could make a decent amount of profit. That is all I can think of and other people could give bigger examples.

You need to estimate when the coin is arriving on the destination exchange because if the price has a big gap, I think that can lead the network to have a big transaction that needs to be confirmed. I would not advise doing arbitrage trading because that is too risky, and it is not worth to try, but if you still want to try, you should think about what coin that you can use to arbitrage trading.

useful topic actually and while arbitrage trading sounds difficult to execute it is actually pretty simple once you understand how it works, so for newbies I will give a few points and try to explain how it works:

1- Pick a coin pair that trades different values on different exchange
2- Buy from the exchange that offers the coin for cheaper value for example you get XYZ coin for 100 satoshi on exchange A
3- Sell the coin at a better price on other exchange making sure its higher than 100 satoshi

It sounds simple but the only problem and the biggest problem is that you won't find much pairs like that now a days.

There are still some coins that do give out some arbitrage opportunities but as said this is pretty rare to happen and once you found it out then there are lots of factors that might affect with your arbitrage opportunity just like when you try to make a deposit, the exchange you've been targeting might hold up withdrawals or deposit which you wont able to make transactions.  Earning is easy but actually hard to be done.
These kind of chances or opportunities do come once in a while but once you spot it out then be sure to be fast on executing things because price gap wont hold that much.