I have mixed feelings of sympathy about this whole RH thing.
Anyone who has used RH regularly should be well aware of how inept it is. Any spikes in volume or volatility, even on a single stock, bring it to it's knees pretty often. Like not just the last week, but even during calm periods. I've personally lost 20-30% on positions solely because RH was bugging out, thankfully I use RH just for "fun trades" usually <$100.
I cannot fathom having the balls to trade any real amount of money on the platform while being aware of these long term issues.
On the flipside I feel for new users and perhaps even generally inactive users who weren't aware of RH's incredible flakiness. I'd imagine (or hope to) the losses of most of those users were small, assuming they were new or casual and just testing the waters.
Even if one of my small plays hit it big on RH, the money would just go to my main account on TD (which has been smooth all week shy of a few hiccups Fri morning during record volume). It's been obvious for a long time that RH should not and cannot be trusted. If you're trading options with a $60K account on RH, well, I don't even have words for that level of ignorance.
I abandoned Coinbase after having difficulties getting a few 1000 bucks out of there. It worked out in the end.
Problems with my data I can tolerate up to a point. Problems with my money I absolutely can not tolerate. As you said, it's unfathomable how people can trade money on a platform that's flaky.
The interesting thing about working for a UK challenger bank - I now have visibility into all of the outages going on at large, high-street banks here.
Complete outages are rare, and well-publicised, but things go wrong a lot more[1] than you might think without any communications to customers that anything is wrong, sometimes outright denying[2] that there's a problem.
Everything has outages. Is this the new narrative now that we've moved on from the leap year thing? That RobinHood is just a bunch of shitty engineers?
There are no public details about the root cause.
I think RH is bad for people in general, but this pile-on is outrageous.
Robinhood crashing isn't an isolated unfortunate "well it happens to everyone" moment.
RH has constantly had issues at least since I started using it over a year ago. I didn't notice it really at first, but I also didn't know much about anything trading related back then. It didn't take long though for me to have my first "incident" where my market orders were seemingly vanishing into the abyss as the underlying moved. I'm not talking seconds, I'm talking minutes. For a market order on high liquidity options. Never mind trying to get filled at anything besides the ask (buying) or bid (selling).
RH has had serious underlying issues for a long time now. This incident didn't happen in vacuum. The writing has been in huge block letters on the wall for a long time.
> There are a couple of situations where outages are not normal or acceptable: 1. Dealing with other people's money 2. Monitoring/managing other people's health
Generally true, but there is a couple of exceptions to this rule: if everyone knows that the company is brand new and does not have an established reputation, then using that app requires a general acceptance of risk.
Robinhood was brand new, and outages should have been expected. The problem with Robinhood isn't the outage, it's that it was marketed to college students gambling with their parent's money, who know just enough about the stock market to be dangerous, but not enough to invest properly.
From what I've heard, the "teams" maintaining most of these aren't paid half as much as a mid-level FAANG team.
Luckily for everyone, those industries are so old, they have accidental redundancy built in (paper records for old doctors who can't be arsed to use a computer, etc.).
Saying 'everything has outages' is kind of disingenuous. There are many computer systems in the world today that can be considered to have practically perfect up-time. Mainframes have uptime measured in decades. I realize the concept of 1 gigantic iron box in a heavily-fortified installation with 2N+1 redundancies throughout is still not enough to ensure 100% uptime. But, when is the last time you swiped your credit card and had a failure to process the transaction?
Anyone who has used RH regularly should be well aware of how inept it is. Any spikes in volume or volatility, even on a single stock, bring it to it's knees pretty often. Like not just the last week, but even during calm periods. I've personally lost 20-30% on positions solely because RH was bugging out, thankfully I use RH just for "fun trades" usually <$100.
I cannot fathom having the balls to trade any real amount of money on the platform while being aware of these long term issues.
On the flipside I feel for new users and perhaps even generally inactive users who weren't aware of RH's incredible flakiness. I'd imagine (or hope to) the losses of most of those users were small, assuming they were new or casual and just testing the waters.
Even if one of my small plays hit it big on RH, the money would just go to my main account on TD (which has been smooth all week shy of a few hiccups Fri morning during record volume). It's been obvious for a long time that RH should not and cannot be trusted. If you're trading options with a $60K account on RH, well, I don't even have words for that level of ignorance.