Robinhood Is Down Again?

Totally agreed on different strokes. If speed matters most, there's nothing like a market order.

I'm rarely using limit orders to shave pennies if I want quick execution. I use them to prevent the unexpected. Under normal market conditions, if the limit is set 10% beyond the expected clearing price, it provides me with free protection against a completely unexpected surprise. Something will have to have gone very wrong with my investment strategies if I'm desperate to buy/sell at any price.

In the long-game case, if I purchase a stock at $0.95 that I think can sell for $0.99, I'll immediately place the limit-order for sale as soon as I've made the purchase. No need to hide my hand -- I'll be happy if you want to buy it at that price (and I might get faster execution by being earlier in the order queue).

I work in finance, and at a previous employer (not Robinhood), I partially rolled a datetime implementation. Mostly it was a wrapper around Boost Date Time [0]. It was a facade that smoothed out the interface and implemented some missing functionally, like a cross-platform strptime and loading of the Olson timezone database.

I spent a better part of a year working on it (along with other things). Modeled the interface after Python's datetime module (which I think is one of the simpler and easy to use date-time libraries across various languages I've used). More than $20B USD trades using that library.

The motivation was the firm used to use RogueWave's date-time facilities, but we moved away after they jacked up the licensing. Think we used to have a site-wide license, but they were moving to a per-core licensing, wanting something like $2K per core annually.

Needless to say, testing was extensive. Overflows were found in Boost in far distant dates, had to work around those. Tested against a ton of historical dates. Tested against Northern and Southern Hemisphere daylight saving time (a lot of people don't realize that Southern is inverted from Northern). Learned a lot about timezones and the history of timezones along the way.

[0] https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_72_0/doc/html/date_time.htm...

Regarding getting some money back from Robinhood, here's an interesting comment I found at Reddit:

> To those of you who deposited funds to Robinhood and are now down your deposit or more, these are technically ACH transfers, and if you genuinely believe Robinhood defrauded you, or otherwise failed to provide service as understood, you can issue an ACH chargeback through your bank’s web portal or by phone for any funds deposited in the last 60 days.

> RH may try to call you into arbitration, but more likely they’ll just ban you from the platform. It’s not a terrible idea if you plan on leaving the platform anyway. Just make sure you can substantiate your losses or they might have a fraud case.

> [If RH dings your credit], you‘re able to dispute with the credit reporting agencies or, if the agencies won’t delete, hire a debt lawyer to resolve. I doubt they would even if able. Any representation they have is likely about to be drowning in FINRA and arbitration prep, some people keep obscene amounts of money on their platform. They also likely can’t furnish any signed documentation of credit pending payment unless you signed up for margin trading.

> If the funds haven’t been deducted from your bank account or are in a pending state, you may also be able to just issue a stop payment. Again, anyone who tries this should ensure that they can substantiate losses related to the payment they stop or chargeback.

"Why should I pay overtime for the system you broke?" - The manager who ignored their engineers requests prioritizing higher quality testing and more redundancy

This definitely does not come from a front-end:

https://twitter.com/jhyu/status/1234617361467990018