
Robinhood trading site seizes up, customers miss stock rally - rainhacker
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-02/robinhood-suffers-online-outage-with-market-advancing-after-rout
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A4ET8a8uTh0
I 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.

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unknown2374
I 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
Believe 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 ).

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holstvoogd
I 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 >_<

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rnotaro
Could you stop spreading a hoax.....

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jdck1326
>A hoax is a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth

Perse probably didn't know it was a hoax.

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dang
Related:
[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)

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cracker_jacks
Quantitative hedge funds must be making an absolute killing these couple weeks
from the number of individual traders trying to daytrade through all this
volatility.

~~~
naveen99
Individual 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.

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_verandaguy
I'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).

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nexuist
Stop 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
Usually 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.

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robjan
Stop loss and stop limit orders are brokerage features.

~~~
kasey_junk
Interestingly 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...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2015/11/18/why-
will-the-nyse-stop-accepting-stop-orders.html)

Lots of other exchanges still offer them
[https://www.cmegroup.com/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c...](https://www.cmegroup.com/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=78447015#content/view/78447015)

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.

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ouid
It was pretty easy to miss if you're in the habit of blinking.

~~~
lvh
This suggests the outage was short. It lasted the entire trading day, during
one of the largest single-day gains of the last few years, during one of the
highest-volatility spikes of the decade.

~~~
ouid
No, this suggests that the rally was short.

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scohesc
I'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.

~~~
thedudeabides5
This is what $0 commissions gets you...

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toomuchtodo
Most 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.

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thedudeabides5
Well, it looks like they make money mostly through a product that doesn't work
literally you need it most, but sure.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Robinhood is not a major discount brokerage.

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Mikeb85
And 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.

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neonate
[https://archive.md/2JRJK](https://archive.md/2JRJK)

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cdiamand
I'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)

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TheGrassyKnoll
Power Etrade was pretty sluggish today for awhile as well.

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henryw
Seasoned traders probably have a second account to hedge.

~~~
jaybeeayyy
almost 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.

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ww520
May be it was a good thing. The market drops again today. The rally was a dead
cat bouncing.

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nostromo
I get the feeling that the less RH is available, the less money their
customers will lose.

~~~
zinclozenge
Well 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.

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devmunchies
I 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.

~~~
lvh
Why is an "exciting" (antonym to boring) language bad for this, and what makes
a language "exciting"?

~~~
cwkoss
Static typing makes it easier to discover errors before the code is running in
production.

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dagw
Perhaps, but how does static typing make a language 'boring' or dynamic typing
'exciting'. I certainly consider Elm and Haskell more 'exciting' than Python
or PHP.

~~~
devmunchies
replace boring with safe. you get the point.

