[ARBITRAGE] Agent Smith: Arbing the great bull run of 2017

[askmike]

I also saw that you have said that this arb is no longer profitable, can you say why?

Arb is profitable! But this specific bot isn't anymore. Main reasons are the decline of poloniex (this means less liquidity and bigger spreads, this is harder to do arb). Also they have updated their fee tiers.

I'm not saying you can't do it anymore on poloniex (pretty sure some people are), I'm just saying that my bot did not make a profit for more than a month earlier this year and as such I shut it down.

I would be happy if you can answer me this - when an order is fulfilled, both coins' prices change. Now, let's say I am making the orders one after the other, isn't the price of one of the coins which is also in the second pair changes as well?

This really depends on what is happening, but if you look at the example in the article:



You can only make money until one of the following things happen:

- btc/usdt price goes up
- btc/eth price goes down
- eth/usd price goes down

whenever any of the those happen your profit goes down (or turns into a loss). If you trade one-by-one you risk any of those happening before you can complete all 3 trades. Especially if other people also want to arb this. Because there is a fixed amount of profit to be made here, and if someone else is quicker and takes the profit he will close this price gap.