Yes you read that right. 13,000% Thats how crazy it was. It was morning May 31 2017 when I was checking out the Bittrex markets and I noticed something that got me excited right away. I saw the ETH/LUN pair had like ~100% spread !! The natural arbitrageur in me was turned on instantly.
I got so excited and i rushed to the BTC-LUN pair to get some LUN to start the ping-pong trading. Before I was able to place an order I was surprised I have some dust left : 0.01345700 LUN which was a little more than $2 at that time. So I sold it just 1 ETHoshi lower than the lowest ask and bought back just above the highest bid later. Rinse repeat.
I ended up making up to 89.40956576 LUN before the final sell to 1.16438256 ETH and after a failed smaller pingpong of 20+ more LUN I ended up with 1.17088539 ETH = ~ $257.59 at that time from the $2+ I started within a span of 1.5hrs ! Thats 13,000 % (and yes, I know the % gain would be much much smaller had I started with a bigger capital because the arbing window can only absorb so much volume before it closes). Not bad for an arbitrageur with very little capital in crypto. Whew! Thank you Satoshi, Vitalik, Lunyr team, Bittrex, the crypto gods, malfunctioning bots, whoever. hahaha
Here is a screenshot of my trading history from Bittrex showing this lucky event :
Since that day i got even more addicted to arbing, pingpongs, scouting little known exchanges, et cetera, looking for these opportunities. In the months that came after I continued with this trading style and I cant help but wonder what made such a crazy opportunity possible at that time, because I could not find anything close to it.
My theory is that it was all bot action that had gone haywire. My sells and buys were filled rather fast considering the insane spread. And even someone with little experience in crypto would at least think twice before buying/selling at market price when the spread is that huge.
So the takeaway here is there is some value in scouting the exchanges for these kinds of opportunities. I will write more about my other trading exploits and maybe a few other things in the future as I try to grow this blog.
I wanted to write about this event long ago but writing was never my thing and I am only trying it now. See how it goes. Maybe I was Inspired when I learned about SteemMonsters. I will also write about this exciting digital CCG in future posts.
I liked what I saw in the Steemit ecosystem just from the point of view of a SteemMonsters player. Because of this I am now officially bullish on Steem and I will try to accumulate as much Steem in whatever way I can.