Taking Advantage of Arbitrage When Selling Litecoin (Bittrex to Coinbase) - I Love Free Money
Planned to sell off some Litecoin today that I grabbed on yesterday's dip - then I noticed something.
The price between Bittrex and Litecoin had a $20-25 difference - was I seeing this right?
Noticed it from the charts on tradingview so maybe it was just their feed that's off considering they "calculate" the USD price since its not an ouput bittrex does.
Time to do some math
To verify I looked at how much BTC I would get by selling LTC and then calculated that against the price of BTC on bittrex (whole accounting for fees) then I looked on coinbase at the price I could sell the same amount of LTC for and calculated what that total amount was.
Holy crap, there really is an arbitrage profit!
Getting more bang for my buck
I decided to use a little BTC to buy a couple more LTC to milk the arbitrage even more as I didn't mind taking off some BTC after this bounce either.
Then I sent my LTC to my coinbase wallet, which cost me roughly $2.40 and once it arrived I sold it on coinbase into my USD wallet for $303.77 a coin, less the $30 ridiculously high commission they charged (really coinbase, I mean really?)
Here is the sale
Here is what LTC was going for on Bittrex (give or take a dollar)
Again, based on my calculations the tradingview price is actually pretty accurate but I decided I'd give myself a $1 buffer along with the fees to see if it was all worth it before I had pulled the trigger.
Final Tally
Proceeds from the Coinbase sale were $2,004. Less the $2.40 withdraw fee from bittrex netted $2,001.60
The bittrex price was roughly $278.31 at the time but I rounded up to $280 just to play it safe. That price times the 6.6976 works out to $1,875.32
Net difference = $126.27
Thank you for the free half a litecoin worth of money - Merry Christmas!
Learn to Invest Like The Cat
Best Regards,
Disclaimer: All content in this post is my opinion and for educational purposes.
Pretty kool to see how this is done. I'm glad you pulled it off as I see from reading actually doing it right is quite difficult. Seems timing is everything just like with many other things...................
Wow-- pretty cool you were able to do that. So here's my question for you: When I sell something for BTC Bittrex and send the BTC to Coinbase, it takes as much as 2-3 hours to muddle its way through confirmations. Which can be dangerous, if you're trying to take advantage of a loophole. Does Litecoin move any faster?
Litecoin is enormously faster and especially so with BTC chain being all backed up. Plus the fees on BTC would wipe out half the gain while LTC is only a couple bucks.]
Also, it really only makes sense to do this on crypto you are cashing out to put into USD. Otherwise to get back into crypto you will pay the higher price on coinbase unless LTC pulls back of the arbitrage converges, but then it becomes an gamble as opposed to a transaction.
The delays are not so much in the networks (though that is an issue). the big problems come from the processing time of the exchanges. Normally these arbitrage disparities occur during high activity periods where the exchanges get gummed up with trnsactions, and you'll see things on bitfinex like "24 hour transaction processing time" In crypto empires are made and destroyed in less time.
OK so I get this is a good idea. However, there are a number of issues with this as a strategy. Firstly, it only works if you can get the fiat value of the litecoin into bittrex without losing. YOu cant deposit cash into bittrex, thats why CEX and coinbase trade at a premium. THe trick would be to be if there were different arbitrages between different currencies on bittrex/ coinbase. For example, if BTC were equal on both exchanges but Litecoin had a 10% + difference. THis rarely happens however... I mean its awesome but I've tried this several times and its very hard to make a profit given the fees and transaction times
Agreed with you points which is why this is a one off thing. I had LTC for the most part sitting on bittrex previously that I wanted to cash out so decided to add a bit to leverage the sale price I was going to get.
Arbitrage is not my investment strategy as most have seen. I'm an active trader.
Well yes, arbitrage is an extremely difficult thing to pull off well, or at all. Still, the opportunity is there if you can swing it.
Good job @scaredycatguide , payed to pay attention in math class.
Glad you spotted this dude. I did the same too.
For a little tip.... Coinbase owns the exchange gdax.com.
You can transfer money to and from coinbase and gdax instantly as coinbase and gdax are essentially the same pool of money!
You will already have an account at gdax if you are signed up at coinbase... they are the same entity.
You can set up limit trades on gdax will 0% fees.... yep, FREE!
Could have saved yourself the 1.5% fee.... or $30 in this case.
Now you know for next time dude.
Goodluck and all the best with your arbitrage! It works!
Make it rain with that arbitrage! Whoo.
Sometimes the prices for a coin on exchange sites like polo and bittrex are also different. You just proved that you can actually use these differences to make some nice extra profit!
dont sell or buy on coinbase just use their other exchange GDAX as the fees are so much lower save the money!
Wow that a crazy exploit—-that’s truly free money!!