Arbitrage opportunities

[proudhon]

There is a major shortage of bitcoins on Intersangos euro market.

https://intersango.com/orderbook.php?currency_pair_id=2

A purchase of just 200 BTC will drive the price to €6. Compare that to MtGox where there are 23,000 BTC for sale at €5.44

If this persists Im going to have to withdraw all my funds from Intersango and send them to Gox, which is a pain in the ass, because Intersango is much easier to use. You dont have to send copies of your id and proof of address to Intersango. Gox is being hobbled by the US banking cartel and I dont want to deal with them.

Win for the guy with 23,000BTC for sale. 

[1715140969]

1715140969

[thezerg]

I've been looking at arbitrage of BTC in practice and I just don't get it.  You have to store thousands of bucks on a bunch of pretty risky "exchanges" (if you can even fill that volume and if you can't its not worth the time); it seems to take weeks to get the cash back around the loop to a usable location (if using Mt Gox and the arbitrage is consistently in one direction), and to top it off you have to do a bunch of paperwork come tax time and Uncle Sam is going to take half your profits as short term capital gains!

The only "arbitrage" I can think of is to go more long on BTC then you'd normally go in one of the consistently-lower exchanges and then if Gox starts heading near your buy-in you quickly shift the BTC over there and sell for your minimum profit.  And of course when you take profits (and plan to keep the money in fiat) you can shift BTC to Gox for an extra 5%.  Makes you wonder why anyone is selling on the other exchanges (at their market prices anyway)... I guess there really is a perceived value to the time Gox is taking to disburse funds...



 

[Bigpiggy01]

My guess is that liquidity levels are managed by continually adding funds to the various exchanges in play. A well funded arb that can do this will always have the upper hand over someone who is trying to 'bootstrap' their funding.

Absolutely and this makes it really really suck if you go faster than usual and run out of funds anywhere on a Friday This is where the leeches come into play with their 2-6% transfers and some of us actually get suckered into using them just to keep our volumes up.

[Seal]

Tygrr trading arb bot on GLBSE was recently shut down. It was a pretty serious effort from Chaang Noi but he admitted the opportunities were too few and far between to be successful.

[genuise]

Tygrr trading arb bot on GLBSE was recently shut down. It was a pretty serious effort from Chaang Noi but he admitted the opportunities were too few and far between to be successful.

This can be well illustraded here bitcoin-analytics.com/#arbitrage
Please, check if you are interested.