Assuming the withdraw from Mt. Gox is the last step, this doesn't matter much to me. Even if the final withdraw takes 1-2 months, a relatively risk free 5% return over that time frame is pretty solid. It beats just about any hedge fund that I know of. Not to mention this can be repeated over and over simultaneously
Relatively risk free? I think not. Plus, from what I've heard 1-2 months is optimistic. What if it is 4-6 months?
First, arbitrage is perfectly legal. A large portion of banking and hedge fund profits come from various forms of arbitrage. I'm not concerned about the legality of this.
The only "risks" here are:
a) You may not be able to get a withdraw processed from Mt Gox.
b) You may incur fees in the transfer process that destroy your net profit.
I am less worried about item a) than item b). I've made a few withdraws from Mt. Gox in dollars, with the most recent one taking about 2 weeks. I did get hit with a pretty massive transfer fee (~30$), but i think that it was a flat rate, and thus isn't much of a concern for this process. The longer the process takes the less attractive it is as an investment obviously. Inflation runs at 2+ % a year and there are many ways to earn a low risk 2%-5% per year.... so I obviously want to do better than that or my money is much better off elsewhere. Factoring in the hassle this may be, i wouldn't want to do it unless I could run the same quantity of money through the process at least a couple times in a year.
/134.5 = 7.2% ) is greater than net amount of fees through the transfer process: (bank -> bitstamp -> buy bitcoins -> Mt. Gox -> sell bitcoins -> bank). Maybe I am incorrect here as I haven't tried it yet..... has anyone attempted to take advantage of this?
