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Robinhood trading site seizes up, customers miss stock rally
- TheGrassyKnoll 7y agoPower Etrade was pretty sluggish today for awhile as well.
- Mikeb85 7y agoAnd this is why larger brokerages are worthwhile. Not to mention, if my bank's app freezes, I can call someone to place a trade if needed.
- henryw 7y agoSeasoned traders probably have a second account to hedge.
- jaybeeayyy 7y agoalmost certainly...the issue is that RH claims to be for the beginner trader. The last two days will push a ton of customers away especially with how volatile the market has been and will continue to be. No one with any sense would continue to trade on a platform where you might not be able to touch anything for an entire day or two.
- scohesc 7y agoI'm pretty ignorant of investing services/brokers... Is this a case of people putting all their eggs in one basket? Does Robinhood have a "guaranteed" 99.9xxx% uptime guarantee? Sucks for a lot of people who evidently are putting a lot of money in the market and couldn't do anything due to a technical issue.
- lvh 7y agoA common adage is that the best service a brokerage can provide is to cut the phone lines during a crash :) Regardless: Robinhood is aimed at individual consumers, not sophisticated investors. It's not uncommon for prosumers to have several brokerages, but of course you're limited in the size of the moves you can make (probably not a bad thing for the median Robinhood user). If you cared this much, you probably had IBKR.
- thedudeabides5 7y agoThis is what $0 commissions gets you...
- toomuchtodo 7y agoMost major discount brokerages are also at $0 commissions. They make their money off of net interest, asset management fees, margin, security lending arrangements, and order flow.
- thedudeabides5 7y agoWell, it looks like they make money mostly through a product that doesn't work literally you need it most, but sure.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoRobinhood is not a major discount brokerage.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nostromo 7y agoI get the feeling that the less RH is available, the less money their customers will lose.
- aloukissas 7y agoAKA, a feature, not a bug :)
- zinclozenge 7y agoWell in this case it saved me several hundreds of dollars because I wasn't able to sell my puts. Of course, it could have just as easily gone the other way and made me lose hundreds if the market reacted more positively to the fed cut.
- _verandaguy 7y agoI'm not a Robinhood user -- do they have guaranteed stop losses? This is something that could appease lots of users (assuming it's used correctly) even in this kind of situation (since _guaranteed_ stop losses exist pretty much for exactly this eventuality).
- nexuist 7y agoStop losses are a feature you can use on the platform, but I don't know if they were executed on time if the whole platform was down...
- kasey_junk 7y agoUsually stop losses are an exchange feature, their atomicity is sort of the point. They wouldn’t be impacted by platform outages. That said I don’t have any idea about how Robinhood implements them.
- robjan 7y agoStop loss and stop limit orders are brokerage features.
- kasey_junk 7y agoInterestingly when I was still writing trading platforms you would be dead wrong. But in the last few years at least nyse & bats no longer offer stops. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2015/11/18/why-will-the-nyse-stop-accepting-stop-orders.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2015/11/18/why... Lots of other exchanges still offer them https://www.cmegroup.com/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=78447015#content/view/78447015 https://www.cmegroup.com/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c... I’d be curious how brokerages actually implement stops on exchanges that don’t offer them natively because synthetic stops have notoriously bad edge cases.
- _verandaguy 7y agoSure, but guranteed stop losses are a form of insurance where, even if the platform's out and stop losses don't execute in time, the customer will be reimbursed for any money lost as a result -- this is what's really more valuable here.
- devmunchies 7y agoI checked one of their backend engineering job postings, using Python and Go... mostly python? Probably should have chosen something ~~boring~~ safe, like Java. A dynamic language like python/ruby doesn't seem to be a good choice for critical financial applications. I'm know it can be done in python, but its about curbing any potential for human errors. Interested in seeing the RCA for this.
- brianwawok 7y agoChanging languages doesn't fix bottlenecks, it just moves it. A good team can make a high perf system in near any language, some will just require more $ per month in hardware...
- lvh 7y agoWhy is an "exciting" (antonym to boring) language bad for this, and what makes a language "exciting"?
- cwkoss 7y agoStatic typing makes it easier to discover errors before the code is running in production.
- kasey_junk 7y agoThere is no rigorous study that has proven this. I wish there were because I strongly prefer static typing but it’s more a belief than anything proven.
- sethammons 7y agoI'm always surprised by what comes across to me as a dogmatic need for a "study" to prove something. There is no study that says my yard needs mowing once a week to look good. I know it because I've lived it. Similarly, I've lived in code bases that were once dynamic and were rewritten to be static. This is not an academic argument: the compiler catches things that I would otherwise have had to remember to put into a test.
- ouid 7y agoIt was pretty easy to miss if you're in the habit of blinking.
- holstvoogd 7y agoI saw a tweet that showed they didn't 'account for' leap years.. And by account for I mean: use a standard date library to handle dates. I too have made this mistake when younger and tried to be smart with dates, but not on a f'ing multi million dollar service >_<
- iamben 7y agoThey said this isn't the case - https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434?s=19 https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434?...
- zinclozenge 7y agoAccording to https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/48mep4/robinhood_not_working/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/48mep4/robinhood... Robinhood went down 4 years ago, off by one day, to the date. Hard to take that reply seriously.
- sharkmerry 7y ago4 years ago, March 2nd was a wednesday, if it was leap year, wouldnt it have crashed on the monday or tuesday when the date didnt line up?
- rnotaro 7y agoCould you stop spreading a hoax.....
- jdck1326 7y ago>A hoax is a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth Perse probably didn't know it was a hoax.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ketamine__ 7y ago
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoI would love to get on RH put down train, but my not no name 401k provider had issues with their website entire Thurs morning last week. It is kinda like a bank rush, only really well heeled institutions can survive everyone and their mother jumping in the fray. Now.. the common question is whether the company should have an infrastructure that can support its customer load at times like this.
- unknown2374 7y agoI think to answer your question, yes, the company absolutely should have an infrastructure that can support this kind of load. The product that RH is selling is execution of trades, and failure to do so has drastic consequences. They are not some social network that can afford to go offline for a few hours due to high traffic, the stakes are significantly different. Another thing to consider is that there are so many great alternatives to RH that were online, despite encountering similar load. If the whole stock trading network went down that would be a different conversation, but users of other platforms were able to trade, and thus RH not being able to provide the infrastructure to handle the load is a huge disservice to its customers.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoBelieve it or not, I agree with you. In cases like this I point to ISPs and their ability to sell more bandwidth than they can reasonably handle. Brokerages for regular clients know that lost uptime equals angry customers, who can and will move their money ( if not more ).
- cracker_jacks 7y agoQuantitative hedge funds must be making an absolute killing these couple weeks from the number of individual traders trying to daytrade through all this volatility.
- pbourke 7y agoThey are. A lot can just mint money in volatile markets.
- naveen99 7y agoIndividual traders occasionally do beat the market makers. That’s why market makers need special rules to boost their profits... remember, nothing stopping individual billionaires from speculating in the market just like individual 9-5’ers.
- dang 7y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22468361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22468361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465178
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/2JRJK https://archive.md/2JRJK
- cdiamand 7y agoI've been following the reaction on WallstreetBets for my new project https://topstonks.com https://topstonks.com I was wondering why mentions of Robinhood blew up yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/iWxEZkS https://imgur.com/a/iWxEZkS
- ww520 7y agoMay be it was a good thing. The market drops again today. The rally was a dead cat bouncing.