Yes there are... Me being one of them... Not the arb you are talking about but it is as pure arb as it can be... You must look at darker area of the market... really darker... It's not my main trading , but when the msgbox shows up, I'll take it... 1 time per day on average... free money....
C'mon... Of course we cannot compete with the lightning fast programs you are talking about and make numerous arbs a day... I just wanted to state that there are some other kind of arbs that can be played by retail traders... I have seen pure arb opportunities lasting 30 mins... Sorry... Back to topic...
for real... illiquid new markets full of inefficiencies... But of course it's not the kind of trading you will live off... Just complementary
Like for example ZG ( gold CBOT ) and GC( gold COMEX ) ... Same tick value.... Same instrument... It's not available anymore since there are bots but I'm sure there were opportunities in early days of electronic GC... It 's a bad example since this one would never last 30 minutes for sure, but there are. Those I trade are not that straight forward ... Sometimes they involve 3 legs( calendar spreads ), one stock leg- one future leg... I've a spreadsheet that scan every market I know there may be opportunities.
The two golds are not fungiable and I really doubt there was much of an arb since that market is well known. As far as arbing with a calendar spread stock and futures you're not talking about thinly traded markets. In this day and age I doubt there is much if any arb there across 3 markets. Care to go into more detail?
Sorry but I don't want to talk about the specific trades I do...However, there's one market were I often see arbs, almost everyday and I take only those that lasts more than 10 seconds( manually )... You're right about calendar spreads... It's really rare that it happens... I have done it about 5 times... None of my markets are fungibles... I repeat that I scan a lot of markets to only make about 1 arb a day.