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Robinhood Is Down Again?

status.robinhood.com

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Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#61

Post by pfarnsworth »

kyleblarson wrote: post #47
spectramax wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't think any sort of gatekeeping to do whatever the hell you want to do with your money is the broker's business. Sure, don't allow naked calls and other margin shenanigans, but for the most part - these are fully functional adults - if they decide to gamble with their money, so be it. Let them do it.

I tend to agree with allowing people to do whatever they want with their own money, but I just cant picture a broker like IB for example allowing this sort of thing without much more serious vetting of the client.

You probably don't know much about IB then. There's no vetting at all, by IB or any other brokerage, except making sure that the money is in their account. They have margin calls for a reason.

Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#62

Post by shireboy »

bob1029 wrote: post #6

I've been defending Robinhood since the beginning but this is just too much. I will start looking at new brokers this afternoon. At this point for me its not so much about the lost opportunity as it is about what the hell actually exploded so hard that they need to be down for 2 consecutive days. From my perspective, it's looking less and less like some one-off technical or hardware screwup and more like a fundamenta…

I actually switched most of my "real" investing to https://www.m1finance.com/ a few months ago. It is also commission-free, but unlike Robinhood you can do IRAs as well as taxable accounts, and it automatically reinvests dividends. One interesting difference is that they limit buys/sells once daily (twice if you pay a small monthly fee). Day traders won't like this, but for buy-and-hold investor not trying to time the market to the minute it makes sense to me. As a developer I'd think it has to be easier to code than real-time. I feel like it's essentially a cheaper Betterment/Wealthfront. I keep a taxable "short term savings" account in 90%bonds/10% stocks, and then my IRAs in 10%bonds/90%stocks.

I was a little concerned they were front-loading orders. Still a valid question, but they say no: https://www.m1finance.com/blog/how-m1-makes-money/

Not to be too spammy, but here's a referal link if you want the 10$: https://mbsy.co/swlqd

Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#63

Post by [deleted] »

spiderjerusalem wrote: post #40
crystaldev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trading with < $1000 is an utter waste of your time. Interactive Brokers has a $10k lower account limit for your own good.

They lowered this to 2k a while back though. EDIT: It seems it's completely removed now. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=4969

[deleted]

Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#64

Post by 013a »

paulgb wrote: post #21
crystaldev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trading with < $1000 is an utter waste of your time. Interactive Brokers has a $10k lower account limit for your own good.

Investing under $1000, especially with commission-free trades, is a good way to learn the basics mechanics of stock trading.

"Investing" and "Stock Trading" are incompatible in the same sentence, unless combined with a phrase like "does not involve".

You can buy and hold, or "Invest", on any platform which, in my opinion, has to meet three minimum requirements: It should offer commission-free trading on a variety of low-cost index funds, it should offer a variety of investment account types (at minimum, taxed accounts, Traditional IRAs, and Roth IRAs), and it should be stable.

Robinhood only meets one of these three criteria. There are dozens of other brokerages out there which do meet all of these criteria: TDAmeritrade, Schwab, Vanguard, and Chase are four great ones.

Robinhood is on the same level as a betting app for sports; so, fine; use it if that's what you want. But do not even mention the word "Invest" in the same sentence as Robinhood; its grossly irresponsible.

Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#66

Post by crystaldev »

ISL wrote: post #35
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Investing under $1000, especially with commission-free trades, is a good way to learn the basics mechanics of stock trading Individual investors are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to intraday trading. For everything other than a child's hobby account, intended to teach emotional stability through gains and losses, a <$1,000 stock-trading account is value destroying.

That education, for a child or an adult, is primarily what one gains from a Also, one need not trade a small account intraday. I make small trades, but they are always with a multi-year perspective. Give me limit orders and small commissions, and I am happy. (N.B. I use a different broker/don't have a first-hand perspective on Robinhood.)

Unrelated but usually you should place a market order usually, not limit. Limit orders take longer to fill, your idea of limits is probably wrong and will lose money compared to a fair market match, it's not worth taking the risk that your order won't be filled, etc.

Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#67

Post by inferiorhuman »

Operyl wrote: post #53
tomashertus wrote: post #51

I already initiated transfer of all holdings from RH. For everyone interested you can do the same: https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/360001226666/tr...

Which, hilariously, will cost you 75 dollars. Man, Robinhood is in for quite the lawsuit.

Most brokerage firms will charge similar fees.

Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#68

Post by JumpCrisscross »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #41
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Investing under $1000, especially with commission-free trades, is a good way to learn the basics mechanics of stock trading Individual investors are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to intraday trading. For everything other than a child's hobby account, intended to teach emotional stability through gains and losses, a <$1,000 stock-trading account is value destroying.

so again you want me to risk > $1000 when I don't know what I'm doing with a real brokerage that I don't know what their benefit is over something like Robinhood because.... ? I'm willing to loose a couple hundred to learn and understand something vs giving someone I don't know thousands and "trusting" their opinion. More so - testing the waters myself may not make me as good as someone who does this for a living - b…

> what a real brokerage tells me to buy

Brokers should never be telling individual investors what individual stocks to buy, at least not anyone with less than ~$500,000 in assets. If a brokerage is giving you buy/sell lines for individual securities, that's a red flag.

A good investment platform (or adviser) guides you in portfolio management. In encourages long-term strategic thinking over short-term trading highs. The former builds wealth. The latter lines professional traders' pockets.

Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#69

Post by notyourday »

Humdeee wrote: post #30
rriepe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked into the technical credibility of this at all [EDIT: I should have more strongly indicated my doubt here], so this isn't any sort of condemnation on my end, but I thought the Leap Day theory was interesting: https://twitter.com/jtech63/status/1234600045787394048

There was a discussion last night about this. Some of the more technically competent posters dismissed it because it's unbelievable that a financial platform would roll their own date-time implementation.

That means people should reevaluate the weight of the opinions of those technically competent posters - we have a screen shot that robinhood did roll their own implementation because yesterday was March 2nd and its app was requesting March 3rd.

That at least means that some portion of their stack used roll your own datetime library. That would not actually be a problem as long as the entire stack got the same library or the same rules for datetime. The problem is of course that it probably did not so the libraries were not bug compatible which of course caused errors and those errors need to be handled, preferably every fast.

Error load and error handling is the least tested part of every system because it can only be properly tested in production and, unless your company embraces the Chaos Monkey approach to testing, the C-level would have a heart attack when anyone proposes doing it.

Re: Robinhood Is Down Again?

#70

Post by eden_hazard »

btown wrote: post #60
eden_hazard wrote: post #36

I'm a QA engineer and this is freaking infuriating. I just went on Linkedin and 0 QA engineers. Just some QA associates that have no tech backgrounds. And one QA Engineer opening. I wonder how long it's been open? How does a trading platform not have a big team of QA engineers? Some dev managers, devs are so freaking arrogant. They think since they aren't coding, they aren't smart and they aren't important. This isn'…

As someone who also needs to explain the importance and nuance of QA engineering to my startup partners, do you have any go-to resources you use to describe/sell the position? Genuinely want to expand my ability to speak to the role.

Point them to situations like this. Maybe small e-commerce sites can get away with it but financial and health tech companies should always double, triple, check everything. Move fast and break things is fine for new startups but once you have a significant amount of users, the reliability of the product should be the main source of pride for the company.

I know not every company needs it. I was the second QA engineer at a food-tech startup in Boston 5 years back. QA got laid off after 10 months but they are still successful without QA right now. They hire great devs and have a great process. At the end of the day, if the site stops working, people will just get some late food deliveries. One the other hand, I've a friend working at Ford in Michigan and he says they have no code. You have hundreds of engineers and everyone manually tests their own code. He says sometimes he will test for a couple of minutes and just push his code. I don't blame him. Devs are great at writing code. Let them write code but have someone else test their code please.

I've a small options position open on Robhinhood. I'm not too worried about it but I imagine some people have tens and hundreds of thousands. I've read some rumors that this outage was caused by the leap year timing and it happened 4 years ago too. This is just unacceptable.

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