Arbitrage
a.k.a. Arb
Buying something in one place and selling it at the same moment somewhere it costs more, to pocket the price gap.
Arbitrage is spotting the same thing at two prices and doing both sides at once: buy cheap here, sell dear there. In forex, the classic version is triangular arbitrage, where three exchange rates briefly do not line up with their cross rate.
In theory it is low-risk money. In practice those gaps last fractions of a second and are hoovered up by banks and high-frequency firms with the fastest wires. If a retail platform seems to offer a free arbitrage, the catch is usually slippage, stale prices or terms that forbid it.
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