19 ms·

Robinhood goes down again, during another historic trading day

328 points by ericliuche 7y ago

minimaxir 7y ago
If a rise in the DOW was enough to shut it down due to load, a massive fall can't be much better. See replies to Robinhood's tweet: https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1237016846282280961 https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1237016846282280961
jaredwiener 7y ago
On an already volatile day: https://twitter.com/NYSE/status/1237009268181798913 https://twitter.com/NYSE/status/1237009268181798913
- dx034 7y ago
  Likely because of the volatility and the demand it caused.
ThisIsTheWay 7y ago
This is the 3rd system outage in the last week. https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/robinhood-outage-cause/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/robinhood-outage-cause/
rococode 7y ago
Wow... Being down once - OK, it was record-high volume, servers were strained. Twice - well, it was only a day after the first time and it takes time to fix these things. But a third time, nearly a week after the first incident (and once again on a volatile day where users stand to gain/lose a lot of money)? Really hard to think of any acceptable justification for that.
- Traster 7y ago
  The simple answer is that the reason the system failed the first time wasn't easy to fix in the short term. Either they need to acquire more hardware resources or redesign some system so that it scales better. Not everything can be fixed overnight. Take a look at reddit - that's a website that collapsed repeatedly for months and months and months. Sometimes it's not something you can just 'fix'.
  - nightski 7y ago
    If they KNEW it was broken and were working on a fix, then they should of shut down the service. I'm sorry but this is simply unacceptable. I don't use Robinhood, but when you are handling very time sensitive contracts that can make or lose people a lot of money in a very short period of time if the service is not stable it should not of been in operation until it was fixed. I can't believe HN is making excuses for this.
    - usefulcat 7y ago
      If they do that, then they're definitely harming any customers who have a position they need to get out of, as opposed to only potentially harming them.
      - nightski 7y ago
        That's exactly what is happening right now anyways. Except in the past week many new positions were opened on a broken platform. If this was Wells Fargo we'd see the pitchforks. But it's a SV company so all is good.
        usefulcat 7y ago
        If you believe that the platform is so broken that it shouldn't be used (and I'm not arguing against that, btw) then a more reasonable solution would be to only allow position-reducing trades. That would also reduce overall trading volume on their platform. Not that I expect them to do any of this, just pointing out that 'shut everything down' is not necessarily the best approach.
        to11mtm 7y ago
        I mean, the investment community knows, and even on other sites there was a lot of encouragement to get -out- before the next disaster struck. IMO anyone who opened a position on RH in the last week should not be shocked that the same thing happened again in this high volume crapstorm.
  - 7y ago
- AgloeDreams 7y ago
  I would imagine the volume differential scale is massive here, they probably are scaled at 1X peak, so they are capable of handling ~3X peak. They are probably at ~10X peak traffic at times. Just are not prepped for a hardcore crash.
- chisleu 7y ago
  Looks like they had a bug w/ leap years and load.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    The issue a few days ago was not related to the leap year. That was only a theory at the time. They have since claimed it was a DNS issue.
- neuronic 7y ago
  I would not be surprised if many trading places have been told to shut down temporarily. [1] https://www.ccn.com/dow-crashes-so-hard-might-close-stock-market/ https://www.ccn.com/dow-crashes-so-hard-might-close-stock-ma... [2] https://www.businessinsider.de/international/stock-market-news-today-indices-plunge-oil-market-chaos-coronavirus-2020-3 https://www.businessinsider.de/international/stock-market-ne... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-08/rout-in-u-s-stock-futures-would-trigger-trading-curbs-at-5 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-08/rout-in-u...
  - IAmEveryone 7y ago
    That’s about a set of specific, known “circuit-breakers”. They shut down trading at the actual exchange, not “ask trading places“ to do so.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    The market makers and exchanges stop executing orders because a series of circuit-breakers fired (set by the regulating organizations). Robinhood and other brokers don't execute any trades, they just forward orders from users to their exchange partners and show up to date quotes. They have a much easier load to bear than actual exchanges.
- zachware 7y ago
  What sets financial services apart when they fail is the extreme legibility of the losses. One can argue that if say Reddit is down, they have losses, but measuring the impact in terms of dollars lost is difficult. It's a lot easier with something like Robinhood. So, ethics aside, the level of measurable risk they have now is existential. Lawsuits will flow.
- throwsprtsdy 7y ago
  I get the impression that the people running Robinhood actually don't understand how difficult it is to implement what they want to offer, both on the reliability side (outages) and on the logical side (infinite margin).
- dehrmann 7y ago
  This is pretty interesting for capacity planning. I worked at a minor ecommerce company when Black Friday was still a big deal. In the month leading up to it, we went into code freeze and made sure all our systems can handle added load. What Robinhood is facing is like that, but with no notice. It means they ~always need to be ready for a 4x(?) increase in load.
  - notwedtm 7y ago
    This is one of the problems that "the cloud" is supposed to solve. No need to keep infra up for that unicorn event, just to ensure that you can scale properly when it does happen.
    - darkwater 7y ago
      Until you hit some kind of aggregation server that it's not trivial to scale out properly unless you take a completely different approach or that you may scale vertically up (but eventually you will hit the ceiling).
chasingthewind 7y ago
Matt Levine had some interesting (and funny!) insights the last time [0] > It is well known that one of the best services a retail broker can provide is not answering the phones during a crash. The market is down, the customers panic, their timing is terrible, they want to sell at the bottom, they call you up to say “sell everything,” you say “we’re sorry all our representatives are assisting other customers, your call is important to us,” they hang up and get distracted, the market rallies, they forget about selling, you have saved them a fortune, good work. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/robinhood-picked-a-bad-day-to-break https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/robinh...
- frandroid 7y ago
  That's amusing, except that the first failure was during a market rally...
  - dmix 7y ago
    That is mentioned in the article shortly after this quote...
- ajross 7y ago
  That's not insight, that's malpractice. I mean, maybe the customers are wrong. But the broker's desire not to execute sell orders and feed a panic is absolutely self-interest, and if they're wrong (and they often are! We had a similar panic just last week that turned out not to have been "the bottom"!) then they've deliberately hurt their customers to try to protect their position in the broader industry. And that's bad. And it's the kind of behavior we tend to see at these overheated moments where the market has gotten away from the fundamentals and all the players are trying to find "tricks" to keep the gravy train rolling.
  - totalZero 7y ago
    I don't know a single broker or sales-trader who would intentionally reject orders from a well-meaning customer. Brokerages make money on commissions and order flow when customers trade. The author of this Bloomberg opinion article has a kind of wisenheimer sense of humor and is playing fast and loose with his comments, in an attempt to make a point about the nature of panic. Failure in moments of market stress is the worst way for a brokerage to protect its position in the broader industry, because downtime damages customer confidence (long-term income) in addition to reducing order flow (short-term income). Order flow is more valuable in moments of extreme volatility because spreads widen when the market goes nuts.
dubcanada 7y ago
You figure they would have just turned the servers up to eleven. At least in such a volatile time period.
- eropple 7y ago
  It's pretty easy to find yourself creating bottlenecked points of failure in systems that expect consistency. There may not be the knobs necessary to scale up past a certain point. A sufficiently bad positive feedback loop can also drive you into the ditch no matter how monstrous your hardware is.
gadnuk 7y ago
It's always been either completely down or having a huge lag in executing orders at market open for the last 6 business days. That leap year bug was a hoax. Robinhood just can't scale under heavy load. I wonder if people will leave the platform en masse to alternatives as most brokers have no fees on trades these days.
- packetlost 7y ago
  The company never said their downtime was related to the leap year afaik, that was some random twitter thread looking at requests on their browser that had datestamps from the future (which could have other explanations). Unless they're rolling their own date library (which is very unlikely), the code should be using the system time of whatever computer the software is running on, meaning it would be extremely unlikely that the leap year caused a bug. You are correct in that it's more likely their system just can't scale.
- xenospn 7y ago
  Something tells me Robinhood users will abandon stocks altogether after this week.
  - Gunax 7y ago
    I never understood the appeal of using a telephone to trade one's life savings anyway.
    - guiriduro 7y ago
      Personally, I never understood the appeal of holding corporate fiat paper however it was transacted.
      - unethical_ban 7y ago
        Because that can turn into federal fiat money used to buy food, save for retirement or go on vacation.
      - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
simplecto 7y ago
I have empathy for the engineers there. Here's hoping they get the resources and support they need. After vents like this juniors turn into seniors, seniors into VPs, and VPs going on sabbatical.
- nathanaldensr 7y ago
  The leap from senior developer to vice president is a lot further than you're implying... a lot further.
  - capableweb 7y ago
    In startup land, a junior developer is another startups senior developer, and same applies to senior developer <> VP. Simply down to what the startup you're working at. Might not be that far.
  - georgyo 7y ago
    In most financial companies, the next step up from senior developer is VP.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      What sort of VP, IT/Development?
      - gberger 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financial_services_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financia...
      - blntechie 7y ago
        VP is just a fancy title for Manager in financial institutions so people feel better.
      - dhosek 7y ago
        It's just a weird financial thing. Everyone gets to be a VP. I was actually a bit embarrassed by having the title when I worked at BofA. It's not even a manager level. I was what would be a senior developer anywhere else.
yuy910616 7y ago
Is it related to the forced shutdown?
- SirLJ 7y ago
  It is not, was just confirmed on CNBC that Robinhood is experiencing system wide issues long after the market reopened... Frankly, if I am an user of this platform, I'll get my money out first thing after the fix the access... If the can't keep the system running straight for so many days, who knows what other bugs they have over there...
lm28469 7y ago
This is a good reminder that all these new mobile(brokers|banks|&c.) are not as good as the historical systems that have been stress tested for decades. All is good when everything works as expected but as soon as the slightest issue arise you're in for a ride.
- behohippy 7y ago
  My direct trading account at my (very) old bank is also saying it's having technical difficulties today. It sounds like display issues, not trade execution issues though.
  - dirtydroog 7y ago
    Well, market circuit-breakers are being triggered all over the world. I doubt anyone would be able to trade even if they could log in.
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    I know Fidelity changed their default dashboards to not load data-heavy views for the past week or two. Usually you get a nice dashboard page with some charts and personalized info, but right now you get a few generic (non-customized) market stats and a bunch of generic links. Still useful enough, and if you want, you can get to your own dashboard... but things like this (inconsequential as they seem) can be the difference between going down or not. Each non-personalized element on the page that's removed saves at least one DB query (and in a fancy app like Robinhood's case, maybe a half dozen).
- dx87 7y ago
  That's what I think of every time I see a post about some new VC backed startup that says they are going to disrupt an industry by creating a lean product that cuts out all of the unnecessary cruft and legacy systems. People need to learn that there's usually a reason something is done a certain way, and having barrels of VC money doesn't make you an expert in a field.
  - 7y ago
Insanity 7y ago
I _kind_ of expected this after last time. I wouldn't want to be working there right now :o
- capableweb 7y ago
  Why not? I think now would be the most interesting time to be working there, where you can learn the most in the smallest amount of time. You'd gain much more knowledge powering through the hard times rather than just coasting around for the easy ones.
  - untog 7y ago
    Yeah but what you’re learning is “how to not catastrophically fail your customers”. In a better company that’s a lesson you already learned. There is going to be a LOT of stress and tension, it's hardly a great learning environment.
    - dylan604 7y ago
      >In a better company that’s a lesson the company already learned. FTFY. Just because you work at a company doesn't mean you were around to experience what ever event provided some sort of "learning" experience. If you don't experience it personally, what ever systems the company has in place to protect itself from said events just look like bloat/legacy cruft ripe for a young upstart to disrupt away.
  - jacobsenscott 7y ago
    If RH had any interest in being a sustainable business that respects their customers they would have hired engineers that have already been through the "hard times", several times, and don't need to learn on the job. But in startup land sustainable businesses are not the goal - customers be damned.
Spooky23 7y ago
Incredible that anyone is still using Robinhood! It's pretty obvious that it's a broker not long for this world.
chance_state 7y ago
If their brokerage license isn't pulled after this, what does it take? C-Suite _literally_ setting customers' money on fire?
- anon102010 7y ago
  Isn't FINRA "self" regulatory in nature.
codingslave 7y ago
All those leetcode engineers RobinHood hired came back to bite them. This isnt web development
minxomat 7y ago
Also, Trade Republic (Germany's Robin Hood) was partially down today because of a partial outage at HSBC. Seems like a rough day for trading.
mbesto 7y ago
And this is what happens when you live wildly on the brink of tech fantasy and tech brilliance. I believe this will be Robinhood's undoing and the company will likely just firesell itself (less than $1B) to Schwab/TD so they can acquire the younger demographic.
partiallypro 7y ago
Does anyone have a good path forward of how Robinhood can even survive after this? Other brokers are not going down, and also offer free trades. I don't even see the point of it anymore, especially if it is going down in some of the most important market moments.
- Traster 7y ago
  I have a crazy strategy, but hear me out: They do nothing. The vast majority of Robinhood's customers aren't day trading clamoring to get their daily dose of tendies. The proportion of RH's customers who are actually effected is probably quite minimal, and of those some might change to another broker, but most will probably just put up with it. The market isn't going to be this active for long, and so once it calms down RH will put in place some fixes for its systems. This will be forgotten after a couple of weeks, it'll perform better next time and it'll have almost no impact on RH's value.
nscalf 7y ago
Oh, is it 10:45 am on a Monday already? After the first two days, I downloaded another broker and determined to transfer, but it's kind of a pain. Guess I have to actually do it now.
anon102010 7y ago
This many incidents makes FINRA a joke. Time for some outside regulators to step in and require certain levels of availability with real consequences if not maintained. See my earlier posts about staying away from RH.
blantonl 7y ago
Merrill Lynch / Bank of America's trading platform is also down... so this isn't limited to Robin Hood. I was completely unable to place any trades or even check balances during the market opening this morning. However, engineering HEADS SHOULD ROLL. In the era of on demand computing, near limitless cloud resources, etc, these engineering teams should have already had capacity planning ready to go for these trading platforms. I'm extremely disappointed - these engineers LIVE for this stuff, and they dropped the ball. Again, heads should roll. This is not some data center that caught fire, this is capacity planning at its lowest common denominator.
- avvt4avaw 7y ago
  The market hit a circuit breaker this morning when it was 7% down. No one could trade at the open, not even professionals, because the market was stopped.
  - blantonl 7y ago
    No, I couldn't event place any orders whatsoever, and couldn't check balances etc. Order PLACEMENT and order execution are two different things. The former was impossible as well.
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    That doesn't seem to be the reason Robinhood is having issues. I don't know if it was the case for the two other platforms OP mentioned but Robinhood seems to have some issues handling the request volumes.
- throwaway3157 7y ago
  > In the era of on demand computing, near limitless cloud resources Should be pointed out that BoA decided to build their own "cloud"
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sf_rob 7y ago
  Agree that heads should role, but it may very well be management decisions that brought them to this point. We don't know if engineering was resource/strategically limited (seems unlikely at a well funded startup but it may have been). Having worked places where terminations were the result of failures, it's not always the party most responsible that is let go.
thedance 7y ago
FWIW, Charles Schwab is also down, and is often down during heavy trading. There's a big reliability gap between straight consumer brokers, and the next tier up with interactive brokers et al.
- snicky 7y ago
  For what it's worth, IB is down for me too. I can log in, but the stock lookup doesn't work at all.
  - sitzkrieg 7y ago
    yes, this. many other systems go down in explosive volatility, including IB, tda thinkorswim, etc and they all have their ass covered with electronic trading risk agreements but you dont hear anything about that on wsb because theyre all casual RH chunkers
cdiamand 7y ago
I just wrote a post about /r/Wallstreetbets reaction to this. I graphed out comments for several different brokers over time, and also mapped how many users were holding SPY puts and got trapped. https://topstonks.com/blog?post_id=robinhood_down_for_the_count https://topstonks.com/blog?post_id=robinhood_down_for_the_co... Needless to say, people are definitely considering moving to other brokers.
jtdev 7y ago
Again... WTF
sergiotapia 7y ago
wallstreetbets called it
stevespang 7y ago
Gonna be a lot of traders bailing out on Robinhood . . . not reliable
msluyter 7y ago
I'd be curious to know the root cause(s) of their outages. I presume they're using Kafka as an event bus, based on their Faust library[1]: Faust is a stream processing library, porting the ideas from Kafka Streams to Python. It is used at Robinhood to build high performance distributed systems and real-time data pipelines that process billions of events every day. I did some evaluation of various Kafka ingestion methods a while back (including Faust), and didn't find Python to be a great fit, so I'd be curious to know if that has anything to do with it. [1] https://faust.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://faust.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- devmunchies 7y ago
  I had looked at their job board to see their technologies and saw heavy use of python. I know large systems can be built in python, but for financial services something more performant and safe probably would have been better. But who knows, maybe Robinhood would never have had the adoption its had thus far if it chose something else.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
  Interesting. I was under , apparently wrong, impression that any real trading happens using C and C++. I had no idea it is Python behind the scenes. Nothing wrong with Python in itself. It just feels like the wrong tool for the job.
rolltiide 7y ago
Look, we’ve been shitting on Robinhood for almost a decade They don’t even come here to defend themselves and people still act surprised
McTossOut 7y ago
If the cracks in Robinhood are not obvious to you in your first months of trading, you're not dealing with enough money for it to matter.
iou 7y ago
So not a "thundering herd" this time, eh? https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2020/3/3/an-update-from-robinhoods-founders https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2020/3/3/an-update-from-robi...
RIMR 7y ago
lol, how convenient.
papito 7y ago
Wonder if it's the Python stream processing system that's bottlenecking: https://github.com/robinhood/faust https://github.com/robinhood/faust
- humbleMouse 7y ago
  Almost like you shouldnt write a trading platform using python!!! Maybe try an actually fast language like java?
elietoubi 7y ago
Feel bad for the engineers working there. Gotta be the most stressful work week of their lives.
humbleMouse 7y ago
What an absolute trashpile of a company. The devops people, cto, and archetects should be ashamed of themselves.
psvidler 7y ago
Hilarious.
jedimastert 7y ago
Man, I picked a hell of a time to dip my toe into the investment game. I picked up a couple of reasonably wide Vanguard ETFs that seemed to be doing fine at the end of last year. I'm currently down 12%, and down 15% in the last month. I suppose that's what I get. I realize that I should be looking at yearly data and I've only had them for a couple of months, but it's a little hard to look at. Not to mention with all of the other RobinHood issues I want to move to another platform I'm already on (I've got an account with Schwab for work stuff and they seem fine), but general wisdom says to hold and let this craziness ride out.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Yep. I don't have a stomach for it. So I've invested my RRSPs into a few different index funds run by Wealthsimple and Tangerine. I literally haven't looked at them in a year. Short term performance is noise, not signal.
- trengorilla 7y ago
  It's a great time to start investing.
- PhantomGremlin 7y ago
  IF: you believe in the long term future of the USA. THEN: dollar-cost-average into the market. Put a fixed amount to work every month. This has been a terrific strategy over the last 50 years or more. But, caution, you probably don't want to buy a few shares per month of a stock or an ETF in a taxable account. That's because each transaction is a separate taxable event when you go to sell. It would be a nightmare for you to track this yourself. I have no idea how well RobinHood tracks that for you. If you are investing in an IRA then no worry. The transactions aren't taxable. Of course an IRA has its own problems. Outside of an IRA long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. But when you withdraw funds from an IRA you are taxed at the higher rate. A Roth IRA doesn't have those tax disadvantages. I've seen a lot of press lately on this issue. For example, in Oregon, the state itself is promoting Roth IRA investing for the "little people": Participants saving through OregonSaves beneficially own and have control over their Roth IRAs https://www.oregonsaves.com https://www.oregonsaves.com
zelias 7y ago
Not to don the tinfoil hat, but the simplest answer is that Robinhood can't afford to cover the consequences of a fire sale, so they take the app down and blame technical difficulties. I have no faith that this company is operating in good faith.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > Robinhood can't afford to cover the consequences of a fire sale They make more money when trading volume is high. What they can't afford is losing customers to either competitors or customers realizing day trading is a bad idea.
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  In what universe is such a theory of vast conspiracy simpler than their servers being overloaded on a busy day? When people sell stocks on RH (or anywhere else) it’s not the broker paying the sales rate. So you’re alleging something like RH having fraudulently sold customers’ stock before? And the market was moving the other way when RH also shut down last week. This would be the only broker in history that had its system set up in a way where they suffer with any trade.
njn 7y ago
Good. Fuck that startup.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Robinhood has served its purpose for me. They brought extreme pressure for brokers to offer zero-cost trades. Now I can do free trades via my Merrill Lynch account and that works for me. There are many other options.
- spoopyskelly 7y ago
  ok boomer
jariel 7y ago
Robinhood is one of the reasons there's a crash in the first place. People trading stocks on the bus etc.. Heyzeus. None of these people are adding information to the market, they're just piling in with money and randomness. This is the same frothiness I remember from the .com when ETrade etc. just became big and all these zillions of people who thought they were investing plowed their money in.
- greenshackle2 7y ago
  All markets worldwide are crashing and the cause is.. US discount brokers? Not, like, the ongoing pandemic?
  - jariel 7y ago
    The pandemic is bursting the bubble, it's not the underlying cause of the problem. The conditions have been building for several years. In 2001, the bubble was burst finally by big shift in interest rates from the Fed, and some insane valuations which cause the smart money to run, causing a stampede. Most analysts have been raising red flags for a long time now. The market has been operating on hype and irrational good vibes for at least a few years. Warren Buffet started hoarding cash some time ago - long before the Coronavirus. Listen to Robert Shiller's interview earlier this year on the FT concerning 'narratives'. I don't think it's a new concept, rather just a modern articulation of it. The mania we're seeing is just a more extreme form of narrative.
    - greenshackle2 7y ago
      I've been looking at the Shiller PE Ratio [1] with raised eyebrows as much as the next guy, I'm just not seeing how discount brokerages specifically are at fault. So far the S&P 500 has lost just one year of gains. I havn't done deep analysis but to me that still seems consistent with expectations that the economy will slow down for months due to sickness and lockdowns all over the world caused by the pandemic (+ this weekend's oil price thing). The PE ratio of the S&P 500 is still 20, so there is still some way down to go before I would call this the bubble busting .I don't have to hubris to predict how much more the market will fall tomorrow or in 3 months. [1] https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Why do people keep using it?
- derision 7y ago
  Because for responsible investors not swing trading the platform works just fine. I buy and accumulate shares over time and haven't had any issues. There might be some outage today but I was able to buy more shares without any issue
- heimatau 7y ago
  I'm getting off the platform after this. I had a tiny final trade (wasn't able to sell due to this) and still waiting on my first amount of funds to get through KYC to go to my bank account (I sold on the previous RB downtime).
- levesque 7y ago
  I assume transferring all your stocks from one platform to another takes time.
  - otachack 7y ago
    It's about 5-10 business days by what I'm going through right now.
- 3pt14159 7y ago
  Easy interface, easy signup, and able to trade derivatives without a mountain of paperwork. I don't use it for the family investment company, but I get why people just starting out do.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  Best UI of any platform, very user-friendly, no options trading commissions (although any serious options trader wouldn't care about that). Those are the reasons people continue to use it.
- monitorman 7y ago
  To be honest, it's the crashes during these 7% down days. Prevents me from panic selling.
thn483 7y ago
Robinhood is like Taco Bell. Such a shitty product and somehow they're still in business.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
carlsborg 7y ago
Being responsible for trading system uptime grows hair on your chest.
- fizwhiz 7y ago
  That's a pretty gendered statement.
  - gotoeleven 7y ago
    We've already learned in the last couple years that there are no physical characteristics whatsoever that are associated with gender. And no mental characteristics either.
    - glouwbug 7y ago
      Would a "sexist statement" been a better use of terms?
    - fizwhiz 7y ago
      Poe's Law strikes again.
    - apta 7y ago
      Can't tell if sarcastic.
- kemonocode 7y ago
  It makes your voice hoarse, that much is for sure.
- RobRivera 7y ago
  This is hands down the best chuckle I had in a month. Context: my dayjob is being responsible for trading system uptime at a major bank.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  To make up for the hair you're no doubt pulling out from your head.
manigandham 7y ago
Robinhood blamed their DNS system being overloaded last time [1]. Also RH (and other brokers) only show quotes and forward orders with some basic calculations to their exchange partners. They should not be anywhere near the same load as the exchanges. All this points to major architectural problems at the company. 1. https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2020/3/3/an-update-from-robinhoods-founders https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2020/3/3/an-update-from-robi...
- dmix 7y ago
  That was a pretty weak explanation, only a single sentence referencing the actual technical issue with some stuff about it causing some knock-on outages elsewhere: > We now understand the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure—which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a “thundering herd” effect—triggering a failure of our DNS system. I was planning to wait for the post-mortem because I dislike speculating and I'm not personally invested here, so I prefer to wait. I'm curious when they'll release the full one because it's going to be one of the most interesting ones in a while, given the large scale of the failure and potential implications... (ignoring today's outage)
mhb 7y ago
What's the appeal of Robinhood over, say, Fidelity? Is it for people who are making so many trades that the $7 or whatever commission is a big deal?
- decebalus1 7y ago
  Not cool enough. In all seriousness, from the features/UI/etc.. Robihood seems to be aimed more at speculative trades as opposed to 'playing the long game'.
- derision 7y ago
  It's not even about large volumes. If I want to buy 1 share of a $15 stock and I have to pay a $7 commission, it's not worth it
- erichurkman 7y ago
  The RH app is nicer for simple trades. From open, authentication, to trade can be just a few seconds. Fidelity app feels very heavy opening just to get to a trade prompt.
altoidaltoid 7y ago
chuckles in CICS
dang 7y ago
Previous related threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477567 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
Der_Einzige 7y ago
Just switched to TDAmeritrade as a result of this crap.
freeAgent 7y ago
At this point, I think Robinhood has to be a dead brokerage walking. I cannot fathom any new potential customers looking at brokerage options today and deciding that Robinhood best suits their needs. Their largest competitive advantage was the free trades, and one can find that at most of their competitors now. Existing customers are also leaving (and possibly suing). The future looks pretty grim for Robinhood.
- kepler 7y ago
  Robinhood's interface is much better than other financial institutions by far, It's one of the most intuitive interface design unrelated to financial products which makes it very pleasing to use. Robinhood disrupt fintech from every standpoint and we should give them credit for that. It opened the doors and allowed younger generations to invest in the stock market where other players failed terribly to do that. Bad days are happening for them in a terrible timing but I believe they will bounce back, I sure hope they do.
- outworlder 7y ago
  I thought that the other benefit would be easy account setup for options trading? The brokers I'm aware of 'interview' you before giving you the ability to trade options.
  - freeAgent 7y ago
    I am able to trade options on Merrill Edge after filling out a form. I think perhaps Robinhood allows people to trade smaller contracts than usual? I can only trade options in batches of 100, which means putting a fair bit of money on the line for any given trade.
Havoc 7y ago
RIP RH. Their target audience is casual investors. The kind of people easily influenced by reddit/twitter sentiment. The fact that wallstreetbets made a PREEMPTIVE RH goes down thread [0] (2500 comments) is pretty conclusive proof that they're never living this one down. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fftyri/preemptive_robinhood_crash_thread_2_the_sequel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fftyri/pree...
vbtemp 7y ago
I ask this literally every time... Explain-Like-I'm-Five: Why would you use Robin Hood instead of a normal brokerage like Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, etc that.. (1) already have commission free trades, (2) an app to make those trades, and (3) don't charge any fee for transferring your holdings in-kind to another institution.
- a13n 7y ago
  - When I created my Robinhood account, none of those brokerages had commission free trades. Also, what about commissions and exercise fees associated with stock options? Also free? I doubt it. - Still today, the UX of all of those other apps/websites (that I've used) is horribly dated, clunky, and slow. Robinhood is amazing to use. - Robinhood has a Cash Management account that pays me 1.35% interest on all my non-invested cash. None of these other services come close to competing with this. - Robinhood started a progressive movement with the mission of making stock trading more accessible to the lower/middle class. I love this company and brand. Schwab is just another faceless corporation who only offers free commissions because they had to to stay relevant.
- nsx147 7y ago
  Yeah you have those things partially because they were RH competitive advantage for a while till the rest caught up
LatteLazy 7y ago
It requires very good engineering, from software to hardware, from Webml to pricing to OMS to connectivity to trade large order volumes during a storm. Robin Hood took market share by being cheaper than other brokers. Cheaper rarely means better (more robust, reliable, etc). That's the price you pay for not paying higher fees. Full disclosure: I shop around for low fees. But that's because I buy and hold boring index funds. It makes no difference to me whether I can trade into or out of a position today or even this week. If you need to change positions quickly or die, for God's sake, don't pick the cheapest supplier.
dmode 7y ago
Did they move fast and growth hack ? There is an absolute culture in the valley now of showing quarterly results and ship something and inevitable trade-off is eng excellence. This culture needs to change dramatically
f-robinhood 7y ago
RH is another one of these trendy "we only hire the best" startups that discriminates against neuro-atypicals with poor social skills who are not good "culture fits"--you know, the kind of people actually detail-oriented enough to make sure leap days are handled correctly. I couldn't be happier to see them crash and burn.
MR4D 7y ago
“Robinhood - like AOL but for money” Ugh. This is a tough issue to design for, and is expensive to run as well.

328 points by ericliuche 7y ago

If a rise in the DOW was enough to shut it down due to load, a massive fall can't be much better. See replies to Robinhood's tweet: https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1237016846282280961 https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1237016846282280961

jaredwiener 7y ago

On an already volatile day: https://twitter.com/NYSE/status/1237009268181798913 https://twitter.com/NYSE/status/1237009268181798913

dx034 7y ago
Likely because of the volatility and the demand it caused.

ThisIsTheWay 7y ago

This is the 3rd system outage in the last week. https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/robinhood-outage-cause/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/robinhood-outage-cause/

rococode 7y ago

Wow... Being down once - OK, it was record-high volume, servers were strained. Twice - well, it was only a day after the first time and it takes time to fix these things. But a third time, nearly a week after the first incident (and once again on a volatile day where users stand to gain/lose a lot of money)? Really hard to think of any acceptable justification for that.

Traster 7y ago
The simple answer is that the reason the system failed the first time wasn't easy to fix in the short term. Either they need to acquire more hardware resources or redesign some system so that it scales better. Not everything can be fixed overnight. Take a look at reddit - that's a website that collapsed repeatedly for months and months and months. Sometimes it's not something you can just 'fix'.
- nightski 7y ago
  If they KNEW it was broken and were working on a fix, then they should of shut down the service. I'm sorry but this is simply unacceptable. I don't use Robinhood, but when you are handling very time sensitive contracts that can make or lose people a lot of money in a very short period of time if the service is not stable it should not of been in operation until it was fixed. I can't believe HN is making excuses for this.
  - usefulcat 7y ago
    If they do that, then they're definitely harming any customers who have a position they need to get out of, as opposed to only potentially harming them.
    - nightski 7y ago
      That's exactly what is happening right now anyways. Except in the past week many new positions were opened on a broken platform. If this was Wells Fargo we'd see the pitchforks. But it's a SV company so all is good.
      - usefulcat 7y ago
        If you believe that the platform is so broken that it shouldn't be used (and I'm not arguing against that, btw) then a more reasonable solution would be to only allow position-reducing trades. That would also reduce overall trading volume on their platform. Not that I expect them to do any of this, just pointing out that 'shut everything down' is not necessarily the best approach.
      - to11mtm 7y ago
        I mean, the investment community knows, and even on other sites there was a lot of encouragement to get -out- before the next disaster struck. IMO anyone who opened a position on RH in the last week should not be shocked that the same thing happened again in this high volume crapstorm.
- 7y ago
AgloeDreams 7y ago
I would imagine the volume differential scale is massive here, they probably are scaled at 1X peak, so they are capable of handling ~3X peak. They are probably at ~10X peak traffic at times. Just are not prepped for a hardcore crash.
chisleu 7y ago
Looks like they had a bug w/ leap years and load.
- shawnz 7y ago
  The issue a few days ago was not related to the leap year. That was only a theory at the time. They have since claimed it was a DNS issue.
neuronic 7y ago
I would not be surprised if many trading places have been told to shut down temporarily. [1] https://www.ccn.com/dow-crashes-so-hard-might-close-stock-market/ https://www.ccn.com/dow-crashes-so-hard-might-close-stock-ma... [2] https://www.businessinsider.de/international/stock-market-news-today-indices-plunge-oil-market-chaos-coronavirus-2020-3 https://www.businessinsider.de/international/stock-market-ne... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-08/rout-in-u-s-stock-futures-would-trigger-trading-curbs-at-5 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-08/rout-in-u...
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  That’s about a set of specific, known “circuit-breakers”. They shut down trading at the actual exchange, not “ask trading places“ to do so.
- manigandham 7y ago
  The market makers and exchanges stop executing orders because a series of circuit-breakers fired (set by the regulating organizations). Robinhood and other brokers don't execute any trades, they just forward orders from users to their exchange partners and show up to date quotes. They have a much easier load to bear than actual exchanges.
zachware 7y ago
What sets financial services apart when they fail is the extreme legibility of the losses. One can argue that if say Reddit is down, they have losses, but measuring the impact in terms of dollars lost is difficult. It's a lot easier with something like Robinhood. So, ethics aside, the level of measurable risk they have now is existential. Lawsuits will flow.
throwsprtsdy 7y ago
I get the impression that the people running Robinhood actually don't understand how difficult it is to implement what they want to offer, both on the reliability side (outages) and on the logical side (infinite margin).
dehrmann 7y ago
This is pretty interesting for capacity planning. I worked at a minor ecommerce company when Black Friday was still a big deal. In the month leading up to it, we went into code freeze and made sure all our systems can handle added load. What Robinhood is facing is like that, but with no notice. It means they ~always need to be ready for a 4x(?) increase in load.
- notwedtm 7y ago
  This is one of the problems that "the cloud" is supposed to solve. No need to keep infra up for that unicorn event, just to ensure that you can scale properly when it does happen.
  - darkwater 7y ago
    Until you hit some kind of aggregation server that it's not trivial to scale out properly unless you take a completely different approach or that you may scale vertically up (but eventually you will hit the ceiling).

chasingthewind 7y ago

Matt Levine had some interesting (and funny!) insights the last time [0] > It is well known that one of the best services a retail broker can provide is not answering the phones during a crash. The market is down, the customers panic, their timing is terrible, they want to sell at the bottom, they call you up to say “sell everything,” you say “we’re sorry all our representatives are assisting other customers, your call is important to us,” they hang up and get distracted, the market rallies, they forget about selling, you have saved them a fortune, good work. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/robinhood-picked-a-bad-day-to-break https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/robinh...

frandroid 7y ago
That's amusing, except that the first failure was during a market rally...
- dmix 7y ago
  That is mentioned in the article shortly after this quote...
ajross 7y ago
That's not insight, that's malpractice. I mean, maybe the customers are wrong. But the broker's desire not to execute sell orders and feed a panic is absolutely self-interest, and if they're wrong (and they often are! We had a similar panic just last week that turned out not to have been "the bottom"!) then they've deliberately hurt their customers to try to protect their position in the broader industry. And that's bad. And it's the kind of behavior we tend to see at these overheated moments where the market has gotten away from the fundamentals and all the players are trying to find "tricks" to keep the gravy train rolling.
- totalZero 7y ago
  I don't know a single broker or sales-trader who would intentionally reject orders from a well-meaning customer. Brokerages make money on commissions and order flow when customers trade. The author of this Bloomberg opinion article has a kind of wisenheimer sense of humor and is playing fast and loose with his comments, in an attempt to make a point about the nature of panic. Failure in moments of market stress is the worst way for a brokerage to protect its position in the broader industry, because downtime damages customer confidence (long-term income) in addition to reducing order flow (short-term income). Order flow is more valuable in moments of extreme volatility because spreads widen when the market goes nuts.

dubcanada 7y ago

You figure they would have just turned the servers up to eleven. At least in such a volatile time period.

eropple 7y ago
It's pretty easy to find yourself creating bottlenecked points of failure in systems that expect consistency. There may not be the knobs necessary to scale up past a certain point. A sufficiently bad positive feedback loop can also drive you into the ditch no matter how monstrous your hardware is.

gadnuk 7y ago

It's always been either completely down or having a huge lag in executing orders at market open for the last 6 business days. That leap year bug was a hoax. Robinhood just can't scale under heavy load. I wonder if people will leave the platform en masse to alternatives as most brokers have no fees on trades these days.

packetlost 7y ago
The company never said their downtime was related to the leap year afaik, that was some random twitter thread looking at requests on their browser that had datestamps from the future (which could have other explanations). Unless they're rolling their own date library (which is very unlikely), the code should be using the system time of whatever computer the software is running on, meaning it would be extremely unlikely that the leap year caused a bug. You are correct in that it's more likely their system just can't scale.
xenospn 7y ago
Something tells me Robinhood users will abandon stocks altogether after this week.
- Gunax 7y ago
  I never understood the appeal of using a telephone to trade one's life savings anyway.
  - guiriduro 7y ago
    Personally, I never understood the appeal of holding corporate fiat paper however it was transacted.
    - unethical_ban 7y ago
      Because that can turn into federal fiat money used to buy food, save for retirement or go on vacation.
    - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

simplecto 7y ago

I have empathy for the engineers there. Here's hoping they get the resources and support they need. After vents like this juniors turn into seniors, seniors into VPs, and VPs going on sabbatical.

nathanaldensr 7y ago
The leap from senior developer to vice president is a lot further than you're implying... a lot further.
- capableweb 7y ago
  In startup land, a junior developer is another startups senior developer, and same applies to senior developer <> VP. Simply down to what the startup you're working at. Might not be that far.
- georgyo 7y ago
  In most financial companies, the next step up from senior developer is VP.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    What sort of VP, IT/Development?
    - gberger 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financial_services_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financia...
    - blntechie 7y ago
      VP is just a fancy title for Manager in financial institutions so people feel better.
    - dhosek 7y ago
      It's just a weird financial thing. Everyone gets to be a VP. I was actually a bit embarrassed by having the title when I worked at BofA. It's not even a manager level. I was what would be a senior developer anywhere else.

yuy910616 7y ago

Is it related to the forced shutdown?

SirLJ 7y ago
It is not, was just confirmed on CNBC that Robinhood is experiencing system wide issues long after the market reopened... Frankly, if I am an user of this platform, I'll get my money out first thing after the fix the access... If the can't keep the system running straight for so many days, who knows what other bugs they have over there...

lm28469 7y ago

This is a good reminder that all these new mobile(brokers|banks|&c.) are not as good as the historical systems that have been stress tested for decades. All is good when everything works as expected but as soon as the slightest issue arise you're in for a ride.

behohippy 7y ago
My direct trading account at my (very) old bank is also saying it's having technical difficulties today. It sounds like display issues, not trade execution issues though.
- dirtydroog 7y ago
  Well, market circuit-breakers are being triggered all over the world. I doubt anyone would be able to trade even if they could log in.
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  I know Fidelity changed their default dashboards to not load data-heavy views for the past week or two. Usually you get a nice dashboard page with some charts and personalized info, but right now you get a few generic (non-customized) market stats and a bunch of generic links. Still useful enough, and if you want, you can get to your own dashboard... but things like this (inconsequential as they seem) can be the difference between going down or not. Each non-personalized element on the page that's removed saves at least one DB query (and in a fancy app like Robinhood's case, maybe a half dozen).
dx87 7y ago
That's what I think of every time I see a post about some new VC backed startup that says they are going to disrupt an industry by creating a lean product that cuts out all of the unnecessary cruft and legacy systems. People need to learn that there's usually a reason something is done a certain way, and having barrels of VC money doesn't make you an expert in a field.
- 7y ago

Insanity 7y ago

I _kind_ of expected this after last time. I wouldn't want to be working there right now :o

capableweb 7y ago
Why not? I think now would be the most interesting time to be working there, where you can learn the most in the smallest amount of time. You'd gain much more knowledge powering through the hard times rather than just coasting around for the easy ones.
- untog 7y ago
  Yeah but what you’re learning is “how to not catastrophically fail your customers”. In a better company that’s a lesson you already learned. There is going to be a LOT of stress and tension, it's hardly a great learning environment.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    >In a better company that’s a lesson the company already learned. FTFY. Just because you work at a company doesn't mean you were around to experience what ever event provided some sort of "learning" experience. If you don't experience it personally, what ever systems the company has in place to protect itself from said events just look like bloat/legacy cruft ripe for a young upstart to disrupt away.
- jacobsenscott 7y ago
  If RH had any interest in being a sustainable business that respects their customers they would have hired engineers that have already been through the "hard times", several times, and don't need to learn on the job. But in startup land sustainable businesses are not the goal - customers be damned.

Spooky23 7y ago

Incredible that anyone is still using Robinhood! It's pretty obvious that it's a broker not long for this world.

chance_state 7y ago

If their brokerage license isn't pulled after this, what does it take? C-Suite _literally_ setting customers' money on fire?

anon102010 7y ago
Isn't FINRA "self" regulatory in nature.

codingslave 7y ago

All those leetcode engineers RobinHood hired came back to bite them. This isnt web development

minxomat 7y ago

Also, Trade Republic (Germany's Robin Hood) was partially down today because of a partial outage at HSBC. Seems like a rough day for trading.

mbesto 7y ago

And this is what happens when you live wildly on the brink of tech fantasy and tech brilliance. I believe this will be Robinhood's undoing and the company will likely just firesell itself (less than $1B) to Schwab/TD so they can acquire the younger demographic.

partiallypro 7y ago

Does anyone have a good path forward of how Robinhood can even survive after this? Other brokers are not going down, and also offer free trades. I don't even see the point of it anymore, especially if it is going down in some of the most important market moments.

Traster 7y ago
I have a crazy strategy, but hear me out: They do nothing. The vast majority of Robinhood's customers aren't day trading clamoring to get their daily dose of tendies. The proportion of RH's customers who are actually effected is probably quite minimal, and of those some might change to another broker, but most will probably just put up with it. The market isn't going to be this active for long, and so once it calms down RH will put in place some fixes for its systems. This will be forgotten after a couple of weeks, it'll perform better next time and it'll have almost no impact on RH's value.

nscalf 7y ago

Oh, is it 10:45 am on a Monday already? After the first two days, I downloaded another broker and determined to transfer, but it's kind of a pain. Guess I have to actually do it now.

anon102010 7y ago

This many incidents makes FINRA a joke. Time for some outside regulators to step in and require certain levels of availability with real consequences if not maintained. See my earlier posts about staying away from RH.

blantonl 7y ago

Merrill Lynch / Bank of America's trading platform is also down... so this isn't limited to Robin Hood. I was completely unable to place any trades or even check balances during the market opening this morning. However, engineering HEADS SHOULD ROLL. In the era of on demand computing, near limitless cloud resources, etc, these engineering teams should have already had capacity planning ready to go for these trading platforms. I'm extremely disappointed - these engineers LIVE for this stuff, and they dropped the ball. Again, heads should roll. This is not some data center that caught fire, this is capacity planning at its lowest common denominator.

avvt4avaw 7y ago
The market hit a circuit breaker this morning when it was 7% down. No one could trade at the open, not even professionals, because the market was stopped.
- blantonl 7y ago
  No, I couldn't event place any orders whatsoever, and couldn't check balances etc. Order PLACEMENT and order execution are two different things. The former was impossible as well.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  That doesn't seem to be the reason Robinhood is having issues. I don't know if it was the case for the two other platforms OP mentioned but Robinhood seems to have some issues handling the request volumes.
throwaway3157 7y ago
> In the era of on demand computing, near limitless cloud resources Should be pointed out that BoA decided to build their own "cloud"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sf_rob 7y ago
Agree that heads should role, but it may very well be management decisions that brought them to this point. We don't know if engineering was resource/strategically limited (seems unlikely at a well funded startup but it may have been). Having worked places where terminations were the result of failures, it's not always the party most responsible that is let go.

thedance 7y ago

FWIW, Charles Schwab is also down, and is often down during heavy trading. There's a big reliability gap between straight consumer brokers, and the next tier up with interactive brokers et al.

snicky 7y ago
For what it's worth, IB is down for me too. I can log in, but the stock lookup doesn't work at all.
- sitzkrieg 7y ago
  yes, this. many other systems go down in explosive volatility, including IB, tda thinkorswim, etc and they all have their ass covered with electronic trading risk agreements but you dont hear anything about that on wsb because theyre all casual RH chunkers

cdiamand 7y ago

I just wrote a post about /r/Wallstreetbets reaction to this. I graphed out comments for several different brokers over time, and also mapped how many users were holding SPY puts and got trapped. https://topstonks.com/blog?post_id=robinhood_down_for_the_count https://topstonks.com/blog?post_id=robinhood_down_for_the_co... Needless to say, people are definitely considering moving to other brokers.

jtdev 7y ago

Again... WTF

sergiotapia 7y ago

wallstreetbets called it

stevespang 7y ago

Gonna be a lot of traders bailing out on Robinhood . . . not reliable

msluyter 7y ago

I'd be curious to know the root cause(s) of their outages. I presume they're using Kafka as an event bus, based on their Faust library[1]: Faust is a stream processing library, porting the ideas from Kafka Streams to Python. It is used at Robinhood to build high performance distributed systems and real-time data pipelines that process billions of events every day. I did some evaluation of various Kafka ingestion methods a while back (including Faust), and didn't find Python to be a great fit, so I'd be curious to know if that has anything to do with it. [1] https://faust.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://faust.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

devmunchies 7y ago
I had looked at their job board to see their technologies and saw heavy use of python. I know large systems can be built in python, but for financial services something more performant and safe probably would have been better. But who knows, maybe Robinhood would never have had the adoption its had thus far if it chose something else.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
Interesting. I was under , apparently wrong, impression that any real trading happens using C and C++. I had no idea it is Python behind the scenes. Nothing wrong with Python in itself. It just feels like the wrong tool for the job.

rolltiide 7y ago

Look, we’ve been shitting on Robinhood for almost a decade They don’t even come here to defend themselves and people still act surprised

McTossOut 7y ago

If the cracks in Robinhood are not obvious to you in your first months of trading, you're not dealing with enough money for it to matter.

iou 7y ago

So not a "thundering herd" this time, eh? https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2020/3/3/an-update-from-robinhoods-founders https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2020/3/3/an-update-from-robi...

RIMR 7y ago

lol, how convenient.

papito 7y ago

Wonder if it's the Python stream processing system that's bottlenecking: https://github.com/robinhood/faust https://github.com/robinhood/faust

humbleMouse 7y ago
Almost like you shouldnt write a trading platform using python!!! Maybe try an actually fast language like java?

elietoubi 7y ago

Feel bad for the engineers working there. Gotta be the most stressful work week of their lives.

humbleMouse 7y ago

What an absolute trashpile of a company. The devops people, cto, and archetects should be ashamed of themselves.

psvidler 7y ago

Hilarious.

jedimastert 7y ago

Man, I picked a hell of a time to dip my toe into the investment game. I picked up a couple of reasonably wide Vanguard ETFs that seemed to be doing fine at the end of last year. I'm currently down 12%, and down 15% in the last month. I suppose that's what I get. I realize that I should be looking at yearly data and I've only had them for a couple of months, but it's a little hard to look at. Not to mention with all of the other RobinHood issues I want to move to another platform I'm already on (I've got an account with Schwab for work stuff and they seem fine), but general wisdom says to hold and let this craziness ride out.

Waterluvian 7y ago
Yep. I don't have a stomach for it. So I've invested my RRSPs into a few different index funds run by Wealthsimple and Tangerine. I literally haven't looked at them in a year. Short term performance is noise, not signal.
trengorilla 7y ago
It's a great time to start investing.
PhantomGremlin 7y ago
IF: you believe in the long term future of the USA. THEN: dollar-cost-average into the market. Put a fixed amount to work every month. This has been a terrific strategy over the last 50 years or more. But, caution, you probably don't want to buy a few shares per month of a stock or an ETF in a taxable account. That's because each transaction is a separate taxable event when you go to sell. It would be a nightmare for you to track this yourself. I have no idea how well RobinHood tracks that for you. If you are investing in an IRA then no worry. The transactions aren't taxable. Of course an IRA has its own problems. Outside of an IRA long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. But when you withdraw funds from an IRA you are taxed at the higher rate. A Roth IRA doesn't have those tax disadvantages. I've seen a lot of press lately on this issue. For example, in Oregon, the state itself is promoting Roth IRA investing for the "little people": Participants saving through OregonSaves beneficially own and have control over their Roth IRAs https://www.oregonsaves.com https://www.oregonsaves.com

zelias 7y ago

Not to don the tinfoil hat, but the simplest answer is that Robinhood can't afford to cover the consequences of a fire sale, so they take the app down and blame technical difficulties. I have no faith that this company is operating in good faith.

dehrmann 7y ago
> Robinhood can't afford to cover the consequences of a fire sale They make more money when trading volume is high. What they can't afford is losing customers to either competitors or customers realizing day trading is a bad idea.
IAmEveryone 7y ago
In what universe is such a theory of vast conspiracy simpler than their servers being overloaded on a busy day? When people sell stocks on RH (or anywhere else) it’s not the broker paying the sales rate. So you’re alleging something like RH having fraudulently sold customers’ stock before? And the market was moving the other way when RH also shut down last week. This would be the only broker in history that had its system set up in a way where they suffer with any trade.

njn 7y ago

Good. Fuck that startup.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

Robinhood has served its purpose for me. They brought extreme pressure for brokers to offer zero-cost trades. Now I can do free trades via my Merrill Lynch account and that works for me. There are many other options.

spoopyskelly 7y ago
ok boomer

jariel 7y ago

Robinhood is one of the reasons there's a crash in the first place. People trading stocks on the bus etc.. Heyzeus. None of these people are adding information to the market, they're just piling in with money and randomness. This is the same frothiness I remember from the .com when ETrade etc. just became big and all these zillions of people who thought they were investing plowed their money in.

greenshackle2 7y ago
All markets worldwide are crashing and the cause is.. US discount brokers? Not, like, the ongoing pandemic?
- jariel 7y ago
  The pandemic is bursting the bubble, it's not the underlying cause of the problem. The conditions have been building for several years. In 2001, the bubble was burst finally by big shift in interest rates from the Fed, and some insane valuations which cause the smart money to run, causing a stampede. Most analysts have been raising red flags for a long time now. The market has been operating on hype and irrational good vibes for at least a few years. Warren Buffet started hoarding cash some time ago - long before the Coronavirus. Listen to Robert Shiller's interview earlier this year on the FT concerning 'narratives'. I don't think it's a new concept, rather just a modern articulation of it. The mania we're seeing is just a more extreme form of narrative.
  - greenshackle2 7y ago
    I've been looking at the Shiller PE Ratio [1] with raised eyebrows as much as the next guy, I'm just not seeing how discount brokerages specifically are at fault. So far the S&P 500 has lost just one year of gains. I havn't done deep analysis but to me that still seems consistent with expectations that the economy will slow down for months due to sickness and lockdowns all over the world caused by the pandemic (+ this weekend's oil price thing). The PE ratio of the S&P 500 is still 20, so there is still some way down to go before I would call this the bubble busting .I don't have to hubris to predict how much more the market will fall tomorrow or in 3 months. [1] https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

Why do people keep using it?

derision 7y ago
Because for responsible investors not swing trading the platform works just fine. I buy and accumulate shares over time and haven't had any issues. There might be some outage today but I was able to buy more shares without any issue
heimatau 7y ago
I'm getting off the platform after this. I had a tiny final trade (wasn't able to sell due to this) and still waiting on my first amount of funds to get through KYC to go to my bank account (I sold on the previous RB downtime).
levesque 7y ago
I assume transferring all your stocks from one platform to another takes time.
- otachack 7y ago
  It's about 5-10 business days by what I'm going through right now.
3pt14159 7y ago
Easy interface, easy signup, and able to trade derivatives without a mountain of paperwork. I don't use it for the family investment company, but I get why people just starting out do.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
Best UI of any platform, very user-friendly, no options trading commissions (although any serious options trader wouldn't care about that). Those are the reasons people continue to use it.
monitorman 7y ago
To be honest, it's the crashes during these 7% down days. Prevents me from panic selling.

thn483 7y ago

Robinhood is like Taco Bell. Such a shitty product and somehow they're still in business.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

carlsborg 7y ago

Being responsible for trading system uptime grows hair on your chest.

fizwhiz 7y ago
That's a pretty gendered statement.
- gotoeleven 7y ago
  We've already learned in the last couple years that there are no physical characteristics whatsoever that are associated with gender. And no mental characteristics either.
  - glouwbug 7y ago
    Would a "sexist statement" been a better use of terms?
  - fizwhiz 7y ago
    Poe's Law strikes again.
  - apta 7y ago
    Can't tell if sarcastic.
kemonocode 7y ago
It makes your voice hoarse, that much is for sure.
RobRivera 7y ago
This is hands down the best chuckle I had in a month. Context: my dayjob is being responsible for trading system uptime at a major bank.
bdcravens 7y ago
To make up for the hair you're no doubt pulling out from your head.

manigandham 7y ago

Robinhood blamed their DNS system being overloaded last time [1]. Also RH (and other brokers) only show quotes and forward orders with some basic calculations to their exchange partners. They should not be anywhere near the same load as the exchanges. All this points to major architectural problems at the company. 1. https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2020/3/3/an-update-from-robinhoods-founders https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2020/3/3/an-update-from-robi...

dmix 7y ago
That was a pretty weak explanation, only a single sentence referencing the actual technical issue with some stuff about it causing some knock-on outages elsewhere: > We now understand the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure—which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a “thundering herd” effect—triggering a failure of our DNS system. I was planning to wait for the post-mortem because I dislike speculating and I'm not personally invested here, so I prefer to wait. I'm curious when they'll release the full one because it's going to be one of the most interesting ones in a while, given the large scale of the failure and potential implications... (ignoring today's outage)

mhb 7y ago

What's the appeal of Robinhood over, say, Fidelity? Is it for people who are making so many trades that the $7 or whatever commission is a big deal?

decebalus1 7y ago
Not cool enough. In all seriousness, from the features/UI/etc.. Robihood seems to be aimed more at speculative trades as opposed to 'playing the long game'.
derision 7y ago
It's not even about large volumes. If I want to buy 1 share of a $15 stock and I have to pay a $7 commission, it's not worth it
erichurkman 7y ago
The RH app is nicer for simple trades. From open, authentication, to trade can be just a few seconds. Fidelity app feels very heavy opening just to get to a trade prompt.

altoidaltoid 7y ago

chuckles in CICS

dang 7y ago

Previous related threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477567 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

Der_Einzige 7y ago

Just switched to TDAmeritrade as a result of this crap.

freeAgent 7y ago

At this point, I think Robinhood has to be a dead brokerage walking. I cannot fathom any new potential customers looking at brokerage options today and deciding that Robinhood best suits their needs. Their largest competitive advantage was the free trades, and one can find that at most of their competitors now. Existing customers are also leaving (and possibly suing). The future looks pretty grim for Robinhood.

kepler 7y ago
Robinhood's interface is much better than other financial institutions by far, It's one of the most intuitive interface design unrelated to financial products which makes it very pleasing to use. Robinhood disrupt fintech from every standpoint and we should give them credit for that. It opened the doors and allowed younger generations to invest in the stock market where other players failed terribly to do that. Bad days are happening for them in a terrible timing but I believe they will bounce back, I sure hope they do.
outworlder 7y ago
I thought that the other benefit would be easy account setup for options trading? The brokers I'm aware of 'interview' you before giving you the ability to trade options.
- freeAgent 7y ago
  I am able to trade options on Merrill Edge after filling out a form. I think perhaps Robinhood allows people to trade smaller contracts than usual? I can only trade options in batches of 100, which means putting a fair bit of money on the line for any given trade.

Havoc 7y ago

RIP RH. Their target audience is casual investors. The kind of people easily influenced by reddit/twitter sentiment. The fact that wallstreetbets made a PREEMPTIVE RH goes down thread [0] (2500 comments) is pretty conclusive proof that they're never living this one down. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fftyri/preemptive_robinhood_crash_thread_2_the_sequel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fftyri/pree...

vbtemp 7y ago

I ask this literally every time... Explain-Like-I'm-Five: Why would you use Robin Hood instead of a normal brokerage like Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, etc that.. (1) already have commission free trades, (2) an app to make those trades, and (3) don't charge any fee for transferring your holdings in-kind to another institution.

a13n 7y ago
- When I created my Robinhood account, none of those brokerages had commission free trades. Also, what about commissions and exercise fees associated with stock options? Also free? I doubt it. - Still today, the UX of all of those other apps/websites (that I've used) is horribly dated, clunky, and slow. Robinhood is amazing to use. - Robinhood has a Cash Management account that pays me 1.35% interest on all my non-invested cash. None of these other services come close to competing with this. - Robinhood started a progressive movement with the mission of making stock trading more accessible to the lower/middle class. I love this company and brand. Schwab is just another faceless corporation who only offers free commissions because they had to to stay relevant.
nsx147 7y ago
Yeah you have those things partially because they were RH competitive advantage for a while till the rest caught up

LatteLazy 7y ago

It requires very good engineering, from software to hardware, from Webml to pricing to OMS to connectivity to trade large order volumes during a storm. Robin Hood took market share by being cheaper than other brokers. Cheaper rarely means better (more robust, reliable, etc). That's the price you pay for not paying higher fees. Full disclosure: I shop around for low fees. But that's because I buy and hold boring index funds. It makes no difference to me whether I can trade into or out of a position today or even this week. If you need to change positions quickly or die, for God's sake, don't pick the cheapest supplier.

dmode 7y ago

Did they move fast and growth hack ? There is an absolute culture in the valley now of showing quarterly results and ship something and inevitable trade-off is eng excellence. This culture needs to change dramatically

f-robinhood 7y ago

RH is another one of these trendy "we only hire the best" startups that discriminates against neuro-atypicals with poor social skills who are not good "culture fits"--you know, the kind of people actually detail-oriented enough to make sure leap days are handled correctly. I couldn't be happier to see them crash and burn.

MR4D 7y ago

“Robinhood - like AOL but for money” Ugh. This is a tough issue to design for, and is expensive to run as well.