Congratualtions Part Time Scrapper!
I'm very excitied for you and also fascinated to watch E-Waste arbitrage in action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage
I'm new to the term -- arbitrage -- and since learning about it, I've been seeing it everywhere. According to the intro to Finance course I sat-in on a few weeks ago, all markets, given time and free-flowing information, will seek to equilibrate.
It seems to me that the E-Waste business is fragmented into multiple micro-markets with significant imbalances in price structure. The prices in these differing E-waste markets are determined by a wide range of factors including:
1) geography
2) population density
3) regional business structure
4) information barriers (the forum is working to knock those down)
5) and perhaps most crucially, access to markets for E-waste liquidation (theoretically, CL and Ebay democratize the markets, but as many others have noted, there are fees and inefficiencies that can frustrate the small time operator).
The fragmentation of E-waste into micro-markets creates arbitrage opportunities. And it's the identification and exploitation of those arbitrage niches by go-getters like PTS that make business so dynamic and fascinating.
In a nutshell: We're witnessing a compression of the bid/ask spread.
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