IMHO, the markets aren't ready yet. 1) The available APIs sucks. MtGox's trading engine tops out at 37TPS. Thirty seven. Price swings trigger situations where

IMHO, the markets aren't ready yet. 1) The available APIs sucks. MtGox's trading engine tops out at 37TPS. Thirty seven. Price swings trigger situations where you can have minutes of lag where price discovery is impossible. These are, unfortunately, the times where arbitrage is most profitable if you have reliable market data. 2) Gox's socket API magically drops cancelled orders here and there so the order book is unreliable. 3) The markets lack liquidity and, although there are profitable strategies that can be exploited, they are only going to make you a few thousand a day at most. This isn't going to attract much attention. 4) There is no historical data to backtest strategies...not that it would be helpful while bitcoin behaves like a penny stock. HFT for bitcoin is pointing a bazooka at a cockroach. Price lags between exchanges correct on the order of minutes--not milliseconds. MtGox is a toy for now. So I was(maybe still am) building a toy trading bot to match ;D.