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An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

blog.robinhood.com

251–260 of 295 posts

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s another example of why DevOps has become a buzzword and most teams just pay lip service to it.

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.

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?

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this your first day of trading or something? People lose money in trading all the time, for hundreds of reasons and some of those reasons are infrastructure downtime. If your risk profile doesn't reflect that, maybe you should take your money out of trading altogether.

I will take it off this platform for sure.

And why -2 points??? Already moving money out.

What is annoying - only 50k per day is allowed.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#253
post #155

Having worked as a professional investor since 2012, I can say these outages can happen anywhere. I've seen day long outages at exchanges where tens or hundreds of billions of dollars would have been trading, at brokers where who knows how much would have traded. I've also experienced these outages at retail companies that are more established, including TD Ameritrade (I become a customer when ThinkOrSwim was acquire…

> The fact that Robinhood is telling people anything about the outage is only because they are the company they are, operating in the startup world/mentaity.

Yep. Intercontinental Exchange and Eurex, two huge capital markets exchanges, routinely have multi-hour outages and don't even acknowledge that they've happened, let alone explain them.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#254
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 1: https://twitter.com/nickrw/status/1141058572…

IIRC the SLA for FPS is 2 hours. So if a bank stops processing them for an hour, that's within tolerance, and they don't need to tell anyone.

I think your point is that it's a very different mindset to the native internet world, and that is certainly true!

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will take it off this platform for sure.

And why -2 points??? Already moving money out. What is annoying - only 50k per day is allowed.

Because complaining about RH being a low quality trading platform is like being angry at the burger quality at McDonald's. You get what you pay for.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#256
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that they can't offer any compensation might be a big problem for them, since they already have zero trading fees Robinhood makes the most money than any known firm on Wall Street by getting paid specifically to leak user's trades to other traders. SEC requires a periodic report on that which shows compensation. Can't believe people are still buying Robinhood's pitch of misdirection.

I think you may misunderstand the concept of "Payment for Order Flow"

In what way?

How would you describe it in a way everyone can understand in as few words?

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#257
post #253
post #155

Having worked as a professional investor since 2012, I can say these outages can happen anywhere. I've seen day long outages at exchanges where tens or hundreds of billions of dollars would have been trading, at brokers where who knows how much would have traded. I've also experienced these outages at retail companies that are more established, including TD Ameritrade (I become a customer when ThinkOrSwim was acquire…

> The fact that Robinhood is telling people anything about the outage is only because they are the company they are, operating in the startup world/mentaity. Yep. Intercontinental Exchange and Eurex, two huge capital markets exchanges, routinely have multi-hour outages and don't even acknowledge that they've happened, let alone explain them.

multi hour isn't day and a half.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why -2 points??? Already moving money out. What is annoying - only 50k per day is allowed.

Because complaining about RH being a low quality trading platform is like being angry at the burger quality at McDonald's. You get what you pay for.

Nearly every brokerage now has zero fee trades, just like RH. They weren't down Monday.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos, these are moderate sized systems you've built over your career. There are lot bigger and more mission critical systems in the world and you might build them one day. I understand GP's tone wasn't exactly nice here. But here's the rub with RH's outage. RH is unfortunately in an industry (Finance, Healthcare, Aviation, Food, etc.) where people _need_ to trust them to be successful. The consequences of failure in…

Boeing's failures have killed hundreds of people. Governments still pay them and people still fly on their planes. Stores sell salmonella contaminated products all the time and people still shop there. RH's failure pales in comparison. Crypto exchanges fail all the time, people still use them. RH may lose a few customers in the short term but I see no reason they wont bounce back, they provide a product people like a…

Technically people still fly the old Boeing planes that don't crash. The 737MAX is still not in service, and there is a likelihood that it may never go back into service. All future orders are cancelled, and there isn't a clear pathway to the plane re-certified and more importantly for people to trust them again.

High trust systems require just that, high trust. And once broken it's hard to re-establish.

Crypto exchanges certainly have their fair issues of downtime, but don't forget that crypto exchanges for a long time operated purely for early adopters as crypto wasn't something that everyone traded. There was also less availability of competition, because again the industry was newer and there were fewer choices.

And certainly Coinbase helped to popularize crypto trading and they had their fair issues, but I don't believe they had an outage of this exact magnitude, and again they were in an early adopter area where mistakes are seen as part of the process. If not expressly, then at least subconsciously.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa...
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