let me crunch some numbers (please tell me if i made any errors anywhere):
- deposit $1000 to bitstamp and pay $5 fee
- buy $1000 worth of bitcoin in (on? at?) bitstamp at $1170.88 you pay $2.5 fee and get 0.85192333BTC
- withdraw bitcoin to kraken and pay nothing! or 0.1% with bitgo (apparently)
- sell bitcoin at $1186.54 and get $1010.54 and pay $2.62 fee so you are left with $1008.21
- withdraw to your bank and if you pay the same fee as bitstamp you end up making $3.21
this is 0.32% profit. if you think the risk is ok such as price changing up and down, withdrawals getting stuck and taking long, ... then do it.
I went over the numbers above and was able to get the profit to almost 1% (about 00.98%), most of that extra coming from minimizing the cost of sending from and to the USA bank. Sending $1k at a time both ways is going to cost a lot more on a per dollar basis than sending larger amounts both ways.
However, as mentioned, liquidity, USA banking hassles, and needing very large volume are problems.
Also is the spread we based the figures on an average spread?
This will add or subtract from the average net profit per transaction.