8 ms·
Robinhood Is Down Again?
- a2h 7y agoFed cut interest rate by 50 basis points. Volume greatly increased since 10AM announcement.
- ajphdiv 7y agoI think it actually crashed right before that.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoPlease move to a real brokerage if you use Robinhood! > Why? EDIT: Because their systems are garbage and their support non-existent. You can do better literally anywhere else (Fidelity, Schwab, Interactive Brokers).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lsiunsuex 7y agoWhy ? Somewhat serious question - what will a real brokerage offer me on my tiny (< 1000) investment - we're just testing waters (at a bad time no less) Blanket statement like that without reason would equal please switch to self hosting git instead of using github.com cause it went down last week or so - both have their purpose / skill level / cost associated with them. So a 3rd party app went down for a bit. Happens often (as most of us know)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zbruhnke 7y agoThe simplest answer to “why?” Is simply FIFO. The fact that they’re trying to get people to increase trade volumes while being stuck to one very limiting tax strategy is bad. If you’re buying stocks you want options and only having FIFO is not a good option
- paulgb 7y agoTo a retail investor who just wants to buy some ETFs and shares of AAPL to get their feet wet, none of these things matter, so this doesn't really answer the question.
- cloakandswagger 7y agoI highly doubt anyone with a portfolio worth $1000 or less knows or cares about things like loss harvesting.
- lsavage 7y agoBecause other brokers also offer commission free investments now.
- dna_polymerase 7y agoFirst off, we shouldn't settle for shitty software, ever. Second, now your investment might be small, if it grows, and represents a portion of your savings you might not be as delighted as today, to see them being offline during such a busy day.
- crystaldev 7y agoTrading with < $1000 is an utter waste of your time. Interactive Brokers has a $10k lower account limit for your own good.
- paulgb 7y agoInvesting under $1000, especially with commission-free trades, is a good way to learn the basics mechanics of stock trading.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> Investing under $1000, especially with commission-free trades, is a good way to learn the basics mechanics of stock trading Individual investors are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to intraday trading. For everything other than a child's hobby account, intended to teach emotional stability through gains and losses, a <$1,000 stock-trading account is value destroying.
- ISL 7y agoThat education, for a child or an adult, is primarily what one gains from a <$1k trading account. That, alone, is worth more than $1k. Also, one need not trade a small account intraday. I make small trades, but they are always with a multi-year perspective. Give me limit orders and small commissions, and I am happy. (N.B. I use a different broker/don't have a first-hand perspective on Robinhood.)
- crystaldev 7y agoUnrelated but usually you should place a market order usually, not limit. Limit orders take longer to fill, your idea of limits is probably wrong and will lose money compared to a fair market match, it's not worth taking the risk that your order won't be filled, etc.
- ISL 7y agoIf an order isn't filled at a price at which I find reasonable, that is okay with me. A market order will fill at any price. I learned that lesson the day that a market order of mine filled at a price I deemed unreasonable. The key to avoiding faffing around with limit orders not filling when you want immediate execution is to place a reasonable limit that accounts for the day's volatility. At other times, I'll place a limit order and let it stand for weeks. When it fills, the counterparty and I are both happy.
- SirLJ 7y agoMature publicly traded company founded by a real pioneer, with ironclad API - it just works: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/ https://www.interactivebrokers.com/
- johnbrodie 7y agoI have no experience with it directly, but Robinhood is also widely regarded (in at least some circles) as having very poor execution. Meaning you're potentially not getting orders filled, or getting them filled at a sub-optimal price. They're also known for having "tech startup" level tech support if there _are_ issues, unlike more established brokers that allow you to talk to a real person almost instantly, allow you to trade over the phone if needed, etc. They're also known for mispricing essentially _every_ morning, showing nonsensical pricing and account values for the first 30 minutes of trading. Overall, their software is clearly lagging behind something like Think or Swim from TDA. Robinhood kind of made sense for low-value accounts that wanted to avoid commission. They've changed the game a bit in that most brokers offer low to no commission now. I'll echo the parent comment, I just don't see the point in using them given that most of the alternatives are better.
- matwood 7y agoAs someone else alluded to, so you don't have to move later as you grow. Moving isn't the end of the world (although from what I understand RH charges $75), but it's just one more thing that's annoying to do. If you want to use one of the better tools, see TDA with ToS. Schwab has great service and is a great bank for a one stop shop kind of experience. IB is one of the least expensive ways to trade if you meet their minimums. RH OTOH has shown time and again they play a bit too fast and loose for comfort when money is involved. They have had to pull their entry into banking a couple of times now. The app seems to have issues at the worst times. From what I have read, support is abysmal. Not someone I want to deal with when it comes to my money.
- cookiesboxcar 7y agoIf you are investing in ETF/indexes then RH being down is not really an issue... and if you are looking to trade at those dollar amounts, then its a great deal. I fall into this category and RH being down has affected me in no way. If you are trading much more frequently/short term, or WSB style options, then yea, I think that a proper brokerage (IB) is likely better for you. Also perusing twitter --- lots of people were planning on executing that _perfect trade_ if only RH was up... lol
- trickledown 7y agoGeesh, what do you want for free.
- jfengel 7y agoWell, "free". They hold your money and your stocks, which gives them opportunities to make profits. They also play middleman (or rather, sell the rights to be a middleman), making a profit on the difference between the asking and selling prices.
- missedthecue 7y agoBrokers make little of their profit from commissions. Even legacy brokers like Schwab. They make their money on advisory services and margin lending.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chickenpotpie 7y agoNo such thing as free in the world of for-profit companies. They're worth billions of dollars for a reason.
- bob1029 7y agoI've been defending Robinhood since the beginning but this is just too much. I will start looking at new brokers this afternoon. At this point for me its not so much about the lost opportunity as it is about what the hell actually exploded so hard that they need to be down for 2 consecutive days. From my perspective, it's looking less and less like some one-off technical or hardware screwup and more like a fundamental limitation of their core architecture.
- shireboy 7y agoI actually switched most of my "real" investing to https://www.m1finance.com/ https://www.m1finance.com/ a few months ago. It is also commission-free, but unlike Robinhood you can do IRAs as well as taxable accounts, and it automatically reinvests dividends. One interesting difference is that they limit buys/sells once daily (twice if you pay a small monthly fee). Day traders won't like this, but for buy-and-hold investor not trying to time the market to the minute it makes sense to me. As a developer I'd think it has to be easier to code than real-time. I feel like it's essentially a cheaper Betterment/Wealthfront. I keep a taxable "short term savings" account in 90%bonds/10% stocks, and then my IRAs in 10%bonds/90%stocks. I was a little concerned they were front-loading orders. Still a valid question, but they say no: https://www.m1finance.com/blog/how-m1-makes-money/ https://www.m1finance.com/blog/how-m1-makes-money/ Not to be too spammy, but here's a referal link if you want the 10$: https://mbsy.co/swlqd https://mbsy.co/swlqd
- rriepe 7y agoI haven't looked into the technical credibility of this at all [EDIT: I should have more strongly indicated my doubt here], so this isn't any sort of condemnation on my end, but I thought the Leap Day theory was interesting: https://twitter.com/jtech63/status/1234600045787394048 https://twitter.com/jtech63/status/1234600045787394048
- eshyong 7y agoThat was probably a joke, see Robinhood's reply: https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434 https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434 Seems like infra problems.
- thdrdt 7y agoSome context (I had no clue what the site is about): Robinhood, a pioneer of commission-free investing, gives you more ways to make your money work harder. Robinhood, a pioneer of commission-free investing, gives you more ways to make your money work harder. It's Time to Do Money.
- jaredwiener 7y agoThey were also down yesterday during the market's rally. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/robinhood-outage-app-back-up-after-glitch-stock-market-rebound-2020-3-1028959673 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/robinhood-ou...
- christophilus 7y agoIt's a shame. I was rooting for Robinhood, since they really did disrupt the brokerage industry. I suspect two days in a row of this will be a death knell for them.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- swiley 7y agoI don’t actively trade stocks but I’ve looked at it. What exactly does robinhood do that etrade didn’t? (Other than the shiny app and front running being a formal part of the business model.)
- asdff 7y agoAdvertise on instagram?
- frockington1 7y agoFor a while they were the only no commission player. Now that virtually everyone offers this there is not much to differentiate them but having a simpler interface. On the other hand the interface is simpler because it offers fewer securities/derivatives
- christophilus 7y agoAs I mentioned, they were the driving force behind the industry moving to zero-commissions. Also, I do really like their app compared to Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, and e-trade. But I'm probably a Fidelity customer for life at this point.
- godlikeNoob 7y agoRobinhood has the worst customer service and security. My account got hacked, I changed the email, phone number and enabled 2FA and it got hacked again. I was trying to resolve it for a month. I really don't see why anybody would use Robinhood instead of an actual brokerage, now that all of them are free.
- freehunter 7y agoWhy did you write this in a format that requires mobile users to scroll sideways? No one is going to read that.
- freeAgent 7y agoI'm a desktop user and it requires me to scroll as well.
- SirLJ 7y agoTrading app Robinhood experiencing ‘major outage’ for a second day amid heavy volume market action: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/trading-app-robinhood-experiencing-major-outage-for-a-second-day-amid-heavy-volume-market-action.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/trading-app-robinhood-experi...
- koolba 7y agoIs this a technical issue with the platform or underlying financial issue with their company and margin system? I would not be surprised if a “move fast and don’t test things” approach to margin stress testing would collapse in the market we’ve had for the past week.
- kyleblarson 7y agoGiven the sorts of positions RH has allowed the wallstreetbets crowd to put on I would not put 5 bucks onto the platform.
- spectramax 7y agoI actually don't think any sort of gatekeeping to do whatever the hell you want to do with your money is the broker's business. Sure, don't allow naked calls and other margin shenanigans, but for the most part - these are fully functional adults - if they decide to gamble with their money, so be it. Let them do it.
- kyleblarson 7y agoI tend to agree with allowing people to do whatever they want with their own money, but I just cant picture a broker like IB for example allowing this sort of thing without much more serious vetting of the client.
- pfarnsworth 7y agoYou probably don't know much about IB then. There's no vetting at all, by IB or any other brokerage, except making sure that the money is in their account. They have margin calls for a reason.
- champagnepapi 7y agoyes it is unfortunately
- eden_hazard 7y agoI'm a QA engineer and this is freaking infuriating. I just went on Linkedin and 0 QA engineers. Just some QA associates that have no tech backgrounds. And one QA Engineer opening. I wonder how long it's been open? How does a trading platform not have a big team of QA engineers? Some dev managers, devs are so freaking arrogant. They think since they aren't coding, they aren't smart and they aren't important. This isn't the first time that it's happened. Robhinhood should have been prepared. This is unforgiveable.
- ndynan 7y agoOften it's not dev managers, but a level above who don't prioritize QA engineering because they see it as a cost center and find it difficult to quantify the risk. If it's not leading to growth it is de-prioritized until fires are burning.
- saalweachter 7y agoA lot of the trouble is that good QA -- and good engineering practices in general -- usually comes down to some equation like velocity x quality = $. If you want to increase your code quality, you either have to slow your velocity or jack up your $'s -- and usually you end up doing some combination of both, going a little bit slower and spending a little bit more money. And if there's one thing people hate more than going slow it's spending more money.
- baal80spam 7y agoBeing a QA guy myself, I am of the opinion that this sums it up pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle
- saalweachter 7y agoMy reformulation is mostly out of ignorance, but since this is the internet, I will contend in a fit of pique that in modern software development, velocity (which is basically scope / time) is more interesting than the two factors individually, because so many of us live in a nightmare world where there are not finished projects, just continuous iterative release cycles.
- kcommam 7y agoRelated: I noticed Vanguard's site was having trouble handling requests last week. It was generally slow and would frequently error out or log out. The site is running well now and it appears at least part of the solution was to switch back to a previous version of the UI. Maybe two years ago they switched to a more responsive, web 2.0-ish interface (which, to my eyes, significantly reduce the information density of their pages in favor of large text and looser spacing). This says to me that someone implemented a poorly performing UI on top of a well-performing backend. Would be interesting, though unlikely, to get a technical response from Vanguard on what happened. My company's 401(k) provider's site was also experiencing significant issues. Seems like last week would have been a fun one to be a system administrator in the investment/brokerage sector.
- tomashertus 7y agoI already initiated transfer of all holdings from RH. For everyone interested you can do the same: https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/360001226666/transfer-stocks-out-of-your-robinhood-account/ https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/360001226666/tr...
- Operyl 7y agoWhich, hilariously, will cost you 75 dollars. Man, Robinhood is in for quite the lawsuit.
- inferiorhuman 7y agoMost brokerage firms will charge similar fees.
- Operyl 7y agoThe problem is most brokerage firms don't have two days of downtime where you couldn't trade at all, while the market is in such huge fluctuation. EDIT: Why am I getting downvoted for this..? That's the reality of the situation here.. If I missed something, please reply instead of just downvoting.
- atombender 7y agoNote that brokerages such as Schwab will reimburse that ACATS fee if you ask and it's a new account.
- kilroy123 7y agoAs a fellow software engineer, I feel for the people who work there. As a customer who lost a decent chunk of money yesterday (and today) because their system was down, I'm angry. I hate to say this, but I do not think they're competent enough to continue to operate as a broker. I, for one, will move all my money off as soon as I can. I'm also going to file a complaint with finra[1]. [1] https://www.finra.org/investors/have-problem/file-complaint/complaint-center https://www.finra.org/investors/have-problem/file-complaint/...
- ajphdiv 7y agoRight there with you. I only use RH for options -- so thankfully not a lot of money in there for me, but I'll be switching everything over to tastyworks.
- taytus 7y ago>I feel for the people who work there. Why? Aren't they paid succulents sums of money for their work? What is going to happen to them? Overtime?
- collinvandyck76 7y agoBecause it makes the assumption that they are still well intentioned and want their product to succeed. Even well paid engineers feel stress. Additionally, overtime pay seems unlikely :)
- jennyyang 7y agoIs this due to their Kafka infrastructure being down? Their tweet last night alluded to it.
- eden_hazard 7y agoThere are some rumors that it's leap year related. Apparently, it happened 4 years back too
- dmead 7y agolink to the tweet?
- mulcahey 7y ago> The outage was not caused by a failure to code for the leap year. We had instability in a part of our infrastructure that allows our systems to communicate with each other. https://twitter.com/askrobinhood/status/1234861941413351434?s=21 https://twitter.com/askrobinhood/status/1234861941413351434?... Sounds like Kafka / message bus to me
- yushuf 7y agoThere Kafka cluster is actually managed by Confluent. I wonder if that has anything to do with the persistent outage
- conduit242 7y agoCould easily be service discovery too, like Zookeeper
- ch 7y agoProbably a JVM GC pause.
- rococode 7y agoIf this is a leap year problem, apparently similar issues happened 4 years ago and they never fixed it... Thread from exactly 4 years ago, March 2 2016: https://old.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/48mep4/robinhood_not_working/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/48mep4/robinhood... Thread that pointed it out: https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fcoaev/and_now_a_brief_flashback_to_four_years_ago_where/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fcoaev/and_...
- ajphdiv 7y agoWow. That is negligence, plain as day.
- ketamine__ 7y agoExcept it's not: https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434 https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434
- wk0 7y agoFor the algotraders out there, figured their status page could be an interesting indicator: https://github.com/wk0/is-millennial-retail-trading https://github.com/wk0/is-millennial-retail-trading
- opportune 7y agoThose are usually updated manually by a human potentially hours after the outage started. It would probably be better to just probe their backend APIs directly
- blackswan101 7y agoUnforgivable. Moving funds to Schwab. And that's saying a lot
- nate_meurer 7y agoRegarding getting some money back from Robinhood, here's an interesting comment I found at Reddit: > To those of you who deposited funds to Robinhood and are now down your deposit or more, these are technically ACH transfers, and if you genuinely believe Robinhood defrauded you, or otherwise failed to provide service as understood, you can issue an ACH chargeback through your bank’s web portal or by phone for any funds deposited in the last 60 days. > RH may try to call you into arbitration, but more likely they’ll just ban you from the platform. It’s not a terrible idea if you plan on leaving the platform anyway. Just make sure you can substantiate your losses or they might have a fraud case. > [If RH dings your credit], you‘re able to dispute with the credit reporting agencies or, if the agencies won’t delete, hire a debt lawyer to resolve. I doubt they would even if able. Any representation they have is likely about to be drowning in FINRA and arbitration prep, some people keep obscene amounts of money on their platform. They also likely can’t furnish any signed documentation of credit pending payment unless you signed up for margin trading. > If the funds haven’t been deducted from your bank account or are in a pending state, you may also be able to just issue a stop payment. Again, anyone who tries this should ensure that they can substantiate losses related to the payment they stop or chargeback.
- ceohockey60 7y agoSince it's Day 2, def appears to be an architectural scalability issue, not some bugs. Quick scan of their engineering blog shows the following stack: -Zookeeper, Kafka, Spark, Airflow, Faust (Kafka Streams in Python) -Kubernetes (was/is SALT + Terraform) -AWS Aurora, PG, ES, Influx -Presto via AWS Athena, Redshift -homegrown solutions for a data lake & managing k8s microservices Fwiw, their team does appear to have a rigorous internal post-mortem process (SEV reviews) [0] drawn from industry best practices. Let's hope a public one will be made when issues are resolved. (FINRA will be asking for one anyway.) Not piling on. I genuinely feel for all the infra engineers staying up all day/night fixing this. [0] https://robinhood.engineering/creating-a-sev-process-that-scales-with-robinhood-4b433f9c439b https://robinhood.engineering/creating-a-sev-process-that-sc...