Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound • Hacker News Board

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#61

Post by danhak » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #16

Reading Reddit's WallStreetBets has been unintentionally hilarious. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ Folks were leveraging up all last week and buying puts, thinking the market was tanking to zero and we're all going to die of "beer virus" as they call it -- and are getting a harsh lesson about timing the market today. They’ve been giving so much leverage to broke young people, I wouldn’t even be surprised to…

There’s nothing unintentional about the hilarity. That community is totally self-aware and rife with in-jokes and satire.

The folks that post there see their gambling for what it is.

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#62

Post by esmi » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

ra7 wrote: post #9

They have been down basically the entire day. Are they going to face some action? I'm unclear who even punishes them for potentially causing millions of dollar losses for customers.

Probably only if there is some type of class action law suit. If customers actually lost millions due to robinhood’s negligence then there is almost certainly going to be one.

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#63

Post by CSSer » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

nscalf wrote: post #44

intuitionist wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t seem like serious enough professionals to release a postmortem. Did they do so for the “infinite leverage” bug? I have a couple grand in play money in Robinhood, because hey, zero commissions, but it’s clearly not sustainable for the long term. I’m glad my real investments are all safely parked at Vanguard, where I likely wouldn’t even notice if the brokerage seized up for a day.

The biggest impact Robinhood has had is pushing other brokers to go to zero commission models. I joined before that happened, but I will be moving my trading portfolio elsewhere.

I’m surprised more people on here aren’t using something like https://alpaca.markets. It’s primarily for algo trading, but there’s nothing stopping you from using it generally, as it is an API, after all.

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#64

Post by EpicEng » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #35

glouwbug wrote: post #7

Guess they weren't ready for the massive amounts of requests coming from a world record market correction / recession. That, or they released a bunch of new features over the weekend. Why we are building highly sensitive monetary performance based applications under the guise of agile and electron is beyond me. The app market needs a market correction in design. IEEE, military, aerospace, or aviation design standardi…

> Why we are building highly sensitive monetary performance based applications under the guise of agile and electron is beyond me. It's cheaper. This is not complicated. The entire society is orientated to getting the most for least. Excessive effort in quality is a waste. Besides, the "serious" people hardly fared better. The notorious TSB failure, for example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tsb-it…

These guys just took $323 million in a series E. They're valued at 7.6B (well, they were...) Can't afford better engineers?

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#65

Post by Moeancurly » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

sjc33 wrote: post #22

My theory is that this was a leap year bug.

You could very well be right, according to this[0] post on Twitter:

> Hey @RobinhoodApp did someone forget to add isleap() to your python module? Imagine losing thousands of dollars because someone didn’t code for the leap year. It’s looking for 3/03 data and throwing errors out the ass. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESIuB4nXYAAYImF?format=jpg

[0]: https://twitter.com/jtech63/status/1234600045787394048

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#66

Post by dzader » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

intuitionist wrote: post #27

elwell wrote: post #12

Being down for an entire trading day is pretty crazy. I can't imagine what's going over there today in the engineering & devops teams. Depending on where the issue is, there might be thousands+ of orders to reconcile (manually?). It will be really interesting to read a post-mortem engineering blog post if they make one.

They don’t seem like serious enough professionals to release a postmortem. Did they do so for the “infinite leverage” bug? I have a couple grand in play money in Robinhood, because hey, zero commissions, but it’s clearly not sustainable for the long term. I’m glad my real investments are all safely parked at Vanguard, where I likely wouldn’t even notice if the brokerage seized up for a day.

just FYI I believe every other major US broker offers zero commissions now

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#67

Post by Tiksi » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

pfarnsworth wrote: post #8

The biggest question is whether or not their systems were able to execute margin calls. If they were down this long, that to me suggests data got corrupt and they've been restoring from backups, etc, which means maybe all their services were inactive. If that's the case then could the margin system be active, or are people (and potentially RH) sitting on oversized losses if they were short today? What happens tomorro…

I tried to clear all user data for RobinHood off my phone this morning and login fresh. At first I got absolutely nothing, but eventually my stocks and options came up, then my watchlist. However the watchlist was missing everything I added to it yesterday, though if I look up a symbol directly it does show as added. So I think your theory of restoring from backups has some merit. I wonder how they'll reconcile any orders placed/executed after the backup was taken if that's the case.

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#68

Post by unknown2374 » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

predictmktegirl wrote: post #54

nostromo wrote: post #16

Reading Reddit's WallStreetBets has been unintentionally hilarious. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ Folks were leveraging up all last week and buying puts, thinking the market was tanking to zero and we're all going to die of "beer virus" as they call it -- and are getting a harsh lesson about timing the market today. They’ve been giving so much leverage to broke young people, I wouldn’t even be surprised to…

Some of us had puts from last month which were well in profit. I personally have lost over $5k from this outage even though I'm technically not negative on my position. Painting all RH users as gamblers is pretty arrogant.

I am pretty sure he was talking about the community of r/wallstreetbets, not RH users.

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#69

Post by Der_Einzige » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #16

Reading Reddit's WallStreetBets has been unintentionally hilarious. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ Folks were leveraging up all last week and buying puts, thinking the market was tanking to zero and we're all going to die of "beer virus" as they call it -- and are getting a harsh lesson about timing the market today. They’ve been giving so much leverage to broke young people, I wouldn’t even be surprised to…

Long term puts (at least 2 weeks out) on the market are the safest investment that you could possibly make. The market recovery today is a dead cat bounce. Mark my words I guarantee you that I will be right about this

Re: Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound

#70

Post by nostromo » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:35 PM UTC

danhak wrote: post #61

nostromo wrote: post #16

Reading Reddit's WallStreetBets has been unintentionally hilarious. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ Folks were leveraging up all last week and buying puts, thinking the market was tanking to zero and we're all going to die of "beer virus" as they call it -- and are getting a harsh lesson about timing the market today. They’ve been giving so much leverage to broke young people, I wouldn’t even be surprised to…

There’s nothing unintentional about the hilarity. That community is totally self-aware and rife with in-jokes and satire. The folks that post there see their gambling for what it is.

I think there's a mix of in-on-the-joke and not.

I've read some sad stories about, for example, a student betting student loan money in the market and losing it instantly, lured to make risky bets from the other stories of dumb luck success.

Here's someone I don't think is in on the joke: https://i.redd.it/at7gloeb5ck41.jpg ... oops