261–270 of 295 posts
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There are a couple of situations where outages are not normal or acceptable: 1. Dealing with other people's money 2. Monitoring/managing other people's health
Ok. Can you describe to me how you’d design RH to ensure 100% uptime? “Failure is unacceptable” and “failure implies total incompetence” are different statements.
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This is the 21st century low cost trading has been around for several decades now
Commission-free stock trading hasn’t, though. If you’re only trading a couple of shares at a time, $5-10 for a trade is a pretty steep fee.
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Commission-free stock trading hasn’t, though. If you’re only trading a couple of shares at a time, $5-10 for a trade is a pretty steep fee.
Fix your stock exchanges to have stock splits then like the LSE does.
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Additionally Robinhood self clears options (or for some other reason?) and does not charge the Options Clearing Corp fee of $0.055/contract or the Options Regulatory Fee of $0.0388/contract which all other brokers charge (incl. ones with $0 or flat rate commissions/fees like WeBull, Gatsby, Tradier). All you pay is the FINRA and SEC fees on sells of about a penny each for small trades. Actually, if anyone knows of an…
What kind of options are you trading such that the fee of a few cents per contract is noticeable? The bid-ask spread is wider than that.
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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 excha…
Online consumption is different than in person. You go to a restaurant and the food is bad you probably don't go back. Online the bulk of consumers just keep going back because that's what they are used to. We love our favorites.
I remember all of AWS going down a couple years ago.
Boeing itself is fine even though one product killed hundreds. Robin Hood is going to be fine. This will be forgotten in a week.
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Does the duration of their downtime suggest a “1/1000” unmonitored oversight? Or is it more like a threshold that was meet and probably could/should have been observed? And FWIW, they have down time every day and weekend, at least in a virtual sense; the load does drop off in a very real sense too. You are spiritually correct, they should pull together and sort it out, and they owe nobody money here (don’t use a disc…
I think you may be focusing on the finger instead of the thing that it's pointing at. The post reads to me like all those examples were meant to be concrete examples to drive home a more general argument that complex systems are, well, complex , and that there's an element of hubris in taking potshots from the peanut gallery.
Personally I don't think Robinhood will ever release a full honest post-mortem and so we'll never know (and never be able to judge fairly).
If the system failed by virtue of being too complex, that is also malfeasance because any devops/SRE worth their salt (as might be expected at a 7 BILLION DOLLAR company) should smell unnecessary complexity from a mile away and slowly refactor it away over the course of several years - which looking at Robinhoods downtime history they never did.
The closest example to Robinhoods engineering woes is Reddit, which throughout its early history made fairly poor infrastructure and data modeling decisions but have since repaired and improved on. We should hold Robinhood to higher expectations then Reddit for obvious reasons. Them having similar engineering capability to circa ~2012 start-up reddit is INEXCUSABLE.
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Sometimes you just have to cut them some slack. Have you engineered a highly available cluster before? I'm not talking about the hot-standby postgres master that gets called on once every 2 years, but I'm talking about a 180 node Cassandra cluster thats doing 15,000 writes a second 24/7 and peaking at 60,000 writes a second every day, and you have to do node replacements every week or two because of the high load. Or…
It is not about scale, it is about the fact that people lost real money. If you can’t make it work you should not be in that business, and I don’t really care how hard they work. I’m taking my account off their platform.
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Those people don’t know what is pin risk. Basically their long puts got exercised because automatic execution is determine at 4pm and they didn’t object (creating a short position in equity), their short puts didn’t get exercised because the stock rallied by 5pm and their counterparty was diligent and prevented auto execution (thus no long equities position to compensate the short equities position). Robinhood couldn…
> Those people don’t know what is pin risk. Is it just me, or does it feel like the only people using Robinhood are college students gambling with their parent's money? Given that many extremely smart people who have devoted their lives to the stock market cannot beat average returns, the lack of Robinhood user's knowledge of "pin risk" seems to miss the greater point.
1) Somewhat pedantic: A big reason why performance is-what-it-is is that at any real $$$ liquidity/volume becomes an issue. Lots of option markets are just not that liquid. If you play with only a few $k and robinhood pays for much of market friction then you can potentially outperform market at risk parity.
2) More real: For most people active trading is not about investing, it is about easy and legal gambling. There is a thrill of throwing you money into high risk options or skyrocketing meme-stocks. Because markets are (relatively) efficient the prices of these assets usually reflect their risk profile, so on average you should gain money (flip side of it being hard to beat market is that it is hard to severely underperform, on average, as long as you don't all-in; normally friction cost makes these kind of strategies not work but RH reduces that significantly). It ends up like going to a casino where on average you make a bit of money (but with high volatility means some people lose a lot, some people gain a lot).
I know quite a few people that were personally affected by this and lost money due to the two outages and they are all pulling their money from Robinhood. The fact that they can't offer any compensation might be a big problem for them, since they already have zero trading fees, which is what most brokerages offer as compensation. Personally it doesn't pass the smell test for me. The load was much higher the previous…
Load problems don't go away when the load disappears. If the system isn't engineered very carefully (this takes a lot of work!), you may have cascading failures that may take hours to resolve, especially if you have bad retry policies (their mention of thundering herd problem seems to indicate that they might). We wrote a bit about this here: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/addressing-... I would str…