Robinhood Is Down | Hacker News Reader

Robinhood Is Down

status.robinhood.com

Funny thing about fintechs that are more tech than fin, they tend to go down right when you need them.

Coinbase was a little like this in the early days. Exactly when you would need market access (aka liquidity in or out) would be the time it would go down.

Kind of downtime that would get you fired at an investment bank in 2005 is seen as matter of course out in SF.

Some people think that Robinhood front-runs its customers as well. I am not accusing them of that, and I am sure their policy is clearly outlined in their fine print terms of use agreement.

The finance world is very different from the startup world. Hard work is very specifically made clear in the cultural expectations and people who fail to deliver are ruthlessly pushed out. Also, in finance, people reap the rewards of their hard work (and the firm's proportional financial success) annually in terms of cash bonuses. It's world's apart from startups, which are much "cooler" than finance.

Exchange risk is a real thing. For all the positives and fun that Robinhood provides, dealing with immature platforms that aren't backed in full by the faith of the US government and social contracts is in most cases not worth the cost.

Robinhood customers are covered by SIPC [1]. Still, those customers should be using a mature brokerage (Fidelity, Schwab, etc).

[1] https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/what-sipc-protects

Thanks; I did not know that. I perceive that a mature brokerage would be more likely to be covered in the event of a "bailout" – are there any other advantages, e.g. 24x7 customer service via phone, including ability to place orders and receive immediate confirmation even when website is down?

Considering Robinhood's website instability, and their total lack of customer service, any mature brokerage would be a better option. Some (Fidelity, Schwab) even have branches you can walk into to get help if necessary. Schwab has $3.25 trillion assets under management (AUM), for example. If that isn't "too big to fail", I don't know what is.

Disclaimer: Satisfied Schwab customer, no other relation

I'm curious how this is going down on the inside right now. I wonder what the issue was and why the fix is taking so long to implement. Curious about the environment and how management is interacting with the developers...

Hopefully the forensic analysis is made public so that we can learn from this outage.

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