Is there like a free scanner/tool to find such opportunities?
The best that you can do is to have the exchanges and check the price differences of the coins and tokens. If you go to TradingView, Coingecko or Coinmarketcap, there are places you will see the price of coins of each exchanges but I do not know how accurate this is but I think TradingView would be good. You can create a bot that can help you to list the exchange price of coins. I am not an arbitrage trader, let us see if someone will post about this.
Also does living in a different time zone affect you spotting or being notified of these opportunities? Usually in what time zones at what times is the crypto market is boring sideways? I am from the UK. I ask because arbitrage trading in a bull market doesn't make sense right?
There is nothing time Zoe has to do with this.
Lastly lets say you buy on 1 exchange and send those coins to another exchange to sell at a higher price. Wont there be a risk that during this transfer that the transfer takes a longer time and is slow and in that time the price could go against you? Isn't it a race against time, arbitrage trading in a sideways or bear market?
It is trading. Trading is risky. So be expecting something like this. I heard that arbitrary trading is not that risky also that you should go for the coins that has fast transaction speeds. But know that no matter how less risky it is, trading is generally risky.
Dex has high trading fees right so arbitrage trading on Dex is not ideal?
Go for the ones with cheaper fee like BSC, Solana, Polygon and some others. You can not do arbitrary with ERC20 because of the high fee. You can also use layer 2 like Optimism.
Which centralized exchanges do you recommend? I'm on CMC & CoinGecko now and lets say for example I buy a coin on exchanges that have the most volume trading volume such as Coinbase or Binance then I find that the same coin is selling at a higher price on a CEX that I never heard before. This CEX has low volume. Shall I take this arbitrage trade? What if this unpopular CEX freezes my account or ask for KYC sensitive docs or even worse scams me and don't let me withdraw my profits?
To avoid CEX risks such as above, which are the top 10 centralized exchanges that have the highest volume on average & have low trading fees? In high volume exchanges, shall I assume high volume means it kills the arbitrage inefficiency of the prices because high volume automatically means efficient market no arbitrage?
So I should only arbitrage trade on altcoins that have the fastest blockchains? What if this limits me on the number of altcoins I can arbitrage trade on and find out the fast altcoins have little arbitrage opportunities?
Which are the best DEX for arbitrage at low fees and high volumes? Are CEX prices more accurate than DEX prices because CEX has more volume?