0.2% is insignificant to the normal differences between the major exchanges in BTC alone, let alone other currencies. Which again for another random point in time compared to my earlier post of the other day sits at 627.297 vs 637.46 which is 1.6% right now. Relatively easy to give out a .5% gain from that with your own profit if you had resources in both places.
The fee for depositing USD via an international wire transfer to BTC-e is 1%. The trade fee on BTC-e is 0.2%, the trade fee on Bitstamp is 0.2% in the best fee-tier. This adds up to 1.4% already.
Even if for some reason you don't pay to deposit and you have the fiat and coins in the right place. You buy Bitcoin for $1000 on BTC-e and pay a 0.2% fee, so total cost: $1002. Then you sell the same amount of Bitcoin for $1016 at Bitstamp (using the 1.6% price difference you mentioned) and pay a 0.2% fee, so total received: $1013.97.
Now, how much funds were involved in this process? Roughly $2000 worth of USD and Bitcoin. So a profit of $11.97 was made on a sum of $2000, or 0.6%. And this is in the scenario that you don't need to deposit or withdraw fiat (more costs!), have employees or an office to pay for (way more costs!), don't have fiat sitting in wire transfers (lowering the profit-%) and didn't run out of either BTC or fiat (lowering the profit-%).
Even under completely unrealistic assumptions, that 1.6% price-difference translates into a 0.6% profit. In reality, the profit will be much less than that.
You don't have to have fiat in places like BTCe as I've explained many times before. You need to have BTC and some other currency to trade into, ltc for example. Some place it would be good to have fiat trades as well, but that does not have to be BTCe where there are high fees for that particular transaction when using your apparently preferred method of bank wire. Its preferable that they have fiat -somewhere- but where that is none of us know.
You are also using in your 'totally unrealistic scenario' a mixture of 1 high cost exchange for fees and my randomly chosen price difference. You have mysteriously
not chosen one of the 3 ways to get Fiat onto BTC-e with no deposit fee. I chose BTCe as my example because that is the exchange that I use most. So the fact that it comes out with some profit makes it even more feasible.
Perhaps he has accounts on Huobi? Where there are 0 trading fees. Other sites have graduated fees that reduce with increased usage. We don't know, and guessing is as previously stated, ridiculous.
Its clear you don't know where these trades are happening. If we did, we would be doing it on our own for a greater profit. Its also clear that it is possible as many of us have done it ourselves with far less resources at our disposal.
You have outlined more overhead then I considered in my example. Certainly when you add more overhead you increase the work necessary to overcome that. So perhaps I would have had to wait 5 minutes either way to take care of bottled water, maybe another 15 minutes either way to take care of the hot secretary. Again, its a pointless exercise when the basic premise is feasible. I have worked the numbers and as outlined in previous posts I see it as quite clearly doable. If you want to imagine your paying for his Rolls Royce Phantom, run youre own calculations to satisfy your imagination.
