Wow, that's a lot of different opinions, and I really appreciate your comments. As you may have noticed, I'm speaking through a translator, so it's not going to be easy to respond to each and every one of them, but I'm going to say a little bit more because there are a lot of people who are curious about this trading strategy.
i don't actually send any crypto, and this is a very important point. There's a common misconception that you have to transfer when you arbitrage. You don't have to. (I say transfer in the body of the post because I didn't really want to say this, but I changed my mind because you guys are curious.) When I do this trade, I go short on Binance and buy spot on upbit, and then I just wait for the spread between the two to widen. In other words, I don't go in after the spread widens. I do the buy before the spread widens.
But you can't just pick up any crypto and wait for the spread to widen, right? So I pick a crypto that's prone to price distortion. This usually happens with altcoins. For example, the crypto I'm currently holding is 'flow'. In my experience, there is a good chance that this trade will give me at least a 1% return this week (but there are no guarantees in the world).
I made a chart of FLOW's spread for you guys.
https://kr.tradingview.com/chart/p60QXU2SOr, if you want to see more detailed movement, try plugging this formula directly into TradingView.
(upbit:flowkrw-binance:flowusdt.p*fx_idc:usdkrw)/(binance:flowusdt.p*fx_idc:usdkrw)*100
I'm holding when the spread on 'FLOW' is 2.5%, and you can see if it goes higher than that in the future. I'll probably exit the position between 3.5% and 6%, depending on the volatility at that time. There are many factors that contribute to this distortion. It could be that the crypto upgrade cut off deposits and withdrawals, it could be that the price has gone up a lot and people are going crazy, or it could be that the price has dropped so much that it's not keeping up with the price overseas. I'm trying to figure this out and do some proper arbitrage.
In January, February, and March, I had fun with aptos.
https://kr.tradingview.com/chart/r0EdVNMl/KAVA is a classic example of a crypto pranked by Korean whales. No matter what the price is overseas, it sometimes happens that it only makes a price in Korea.
https://kr.tradingview.com/chart/f81jB9R7/Two weeks ago, METAL was doing this.
https://kr.tradingview.com/chart/wqrts0jF/By the way, only Koreans can do this on upbit. Upbit doesn't accept foreigners, but since Korea doesn't have a perfect crypto policy, it's possible for Koreans to use Binance Global, so I can hunt for these arbitrage opportunities. Of course, I don't think this arbitrage will last forever. One day, when the crypto market stabilizes in terms of policy, the loophole will be closed. But before that happens, I've been thinking about whether there's something to grow. I was very curious to see how it was viewed by global traders. I guess the trust issue is the biggest barrier for me to scale it into a business. Thanks for your thoughts.
oh. I have one more question: In my country, it is illegal for an individual who is not registered as an investment company to manage other people's money. I assume it is the same in your country? It seems difficult to create a legal organization and do business with crypto.
Have a good day everyone.
Additions to comments1) It's hard for me to provide evidence of profits. As anyone who has done arbitrage trading based on the distortion of spot prices knows, the short side records a deficit, so this side has a huge deficit, and upbit doesn't have a function to provide cumulative profit data. I can show you how much money I withdrew from upbit to my bank, but I don't need to do that in this post. It's in Korean. haha
Additions to comments2) It is difficult to transfer money from a bank in South Korea to a bank in the U.S. That method is a premium hunting method used in the past. So many people used this method in the past that Korean banks, along with the government, are now strictly controlling it. This control seems to be isolating Korean exchanges and causing price distortions.I only realize profits through the spread between Binance and Upbit and increase the KRW on the exchange. It's similar to how you guys increase your USDT.