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Edit: see below. My math was a bit off.
no... it’s 140 option contracts which provides the option for 14000 shares. they were bought for $66 x 100 x 140 = $924,000 and are now worth $14.43 x 100 x 140 = $202,000.
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I watched all that live and saw my own holdings tumble. There wasn't that much suspense though, nobody thought the market would suddenly go up.
Were people really expecting the markets to go up today? Futures were mixed pre-market. Bloomberg, at least, was framing the optimism as due to people expecting central banks to intervene but central banks can only do so much when your supply chain evaporates. I was certainly caught off guard but still managed to make a bit of money (~6%) off of one of those idiotic volatility ETNs today.
The position I kept, I got fucked hard by this Robinhood downtime. Ended up losing all of it, (4x of my original 13x profit), whereas I was trying to exit it early Monday. If I lose money on the market and it's my fault… fine. But when my broker causes the loss, I'm pissed
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…
It's probably one of the most suspenseful market opens in history. The tug of war between bulls and bears across the entire sub has been incredibly entertaining. Regarding leverage: buying options is a fixed loss against the cash in your account. RH also only allows selling secured options. There's no way to lose more than you started with (at least with the current app, they had problems before). Retail investors us…
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Your internet goes down, you can’t watch netflix. Boo hoo. Your brokerage goes down, you can’t exit your positions, and, well, just look at the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost on reddit today. People were using their student loan money in their brokerage accounts. It really is a disaster.
> People were using their student loan money in their brokerage accounts Doesn't sound like the smartest thing to do.
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.
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> People were using their student loan money in their brokerage accounts Doesn't sound like the smartest thing to do.
Reminder that the financial return maximising function for Robinhood benefits far more from "unsophisticated investors put in their student loans" than "service is up all the time". People who are actively trading, especially in options, may well be losing money.
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.
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This person is probing an API which is already down so of course there are errors. Robinhood would be using a proper date library anyway to handle timezones. The system was fine on the 29th, 1st and even this morning pre-market. Seems more like a capacity issue that cascaded into failure.
The chances that it was also down exactly 4 years ago today (it was) are astronomical though.
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.
"Nines don't matter if the users aren't happy", to quote Charity Majors. No-one will remember all the uptime for the rest of the month, or indeed year. Just the hours they were down for a critical trading day.
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…
This aged terribly. Anyone who did that received a massive windfall.