Quote from: crazyivan on March 25, 2014, 08:20:16 PM

Quote from: franky1 on March 25, 2014, 11:57:19 AM

Quote from: crazyivan on March 24, 2014, 07:35:13 PM

Heh, that is really cunning plan. But I am really interested in experiences of people who have been actually doing arbitrage. With this constant 2% spread on average between exchanges, there must be some people who profit on this. Am I the only one making money on BTC arbitrage?

2% spread on exchanges does not include withdrawal fee's etc. so as long as you have large enough order sizes that can compensate the fee's and have an amount of dollar/alt/bitcoin on both exchanges for instant use. then the arbitrage is just the slower movement of funds to replenish the reserves you have just used in the trades.

sometimes its not worth it for a 1-2% as the time to replenish the reserves can make you miss out on bigger price changes.
(getting dollar from exchange A to exchange B is not a 10 minute task)

best method.. say you have $10k investment split it up into 4 reserves of $2.5k

exchange A
$2.5k deposited into here and left as dollar
$2.5k deposited and turned into bitcoin

exchange B
$2.5k deposited into here and left as dollar
if lower in price $2.5k deposited and turned into bitcoin
if higher in price use Exchange A to buy the bitcoin with the deposited reserve and transfer bitcoins to exchange B
and deposit the spare 4th $2.5k into exchange A to replenish that dollar reserve

now the rest is a juggling game

i mess around with arbitraging bitcoins with altcoins(fast exchange withdrawal/deposits). so feel free to replace the '$2.5k' with an altcoin amout of your choosing that matches bitcoin total you also have. and someone else said it, but i have 90% of funds in cold store and only play arbitrage with 10% of total. as thats my limit of trust with third parties.
the best volumes and price movements are on the dollar hense using dollar as an example. (slow dollar movement through accounts). id say small amounts below 5btc can get away with altcoin arbitraging. large amounts 20btc($10k+) can require bank transfers alot, just to be on high volume exchanges

Now this is the answer I was searching for. Franky1, thank you very much for this detailed plan, I ll try something similar, only with a bit lower investment. How I miss those days when Bitinstant and Mtgox were around.

I have been investigating arbitrage options for some time now, and it looks to me as if a lot of people doing that do not change BTC to USD and then transfer the USD from exchange A to exchange B, but instead use DOGE for this!! DOGE has been pretty stable the last few weeks and transferring them is very fast.