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Comment by SmellTheGlove | Hacker News Reader

Schwab doesn't have outages during sell-offs of very visible investments, though. Hasn't Robinhood hit the rocks pretty hard during GME and DOGE sell-offs recently? The reason I won't use them is because I don't think I'm their customer - whoever is paying for the order flow is, and I don't trust their platform to be available in the middle of turbulence.

EDIT: I get it - Schwab also had visible outages. Sorry for that. Maybe a good time to say I'm a happy Fidelity customer and have been for years :D

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As a Schwab customer, I can confidently note there are many outages, especially on volatile market days.

Sometimes, you have no idea if an order went through. With e-trade you get a sub-second push notification for trade confirmations, but with Schwab those push notifications come minutes or hours later. Meanwhile, if the website is down, you have no idea what exposure you have.

I recommend you try out StreetSmartEdge for Schwab. While the UI is definitely Windows95-like, it's been reliable. The Schwab website + mobile app are not very good though.

UI being Windows 95-like sounds like a compliment to me.

seconded

Yes but are those outages linked to specific stocks/crypto or happen randomly? RH had a major outage on one of the busiest trading days and people were upset but quickly forgiving. What's happened recently is not the same.

They dont happen randomly, they happen on high-volatility and high-volume days. Days where I want to re-balance my portfolio, or hedge. They happen at the worst times.

Taking a guess as an Engineer, they seem like load issues. Because page response times degrade from 2s, to 10s, to 30s, to timeouts.

Very odd to see massively wealthy industries still struggling to provide stable operations.

It puzzles me also! Isn't handling load a known science at this point?!?

You just need to cough up some $ and hire some ex-SF/SV folks who have done big sites -- something top-5 brokerages should be able to hire.

Something in the system probably removes the benefits of improving latency. People losing money this way are probably not numerous enough or too immature to sue. "Less efforts and more profit.. why bother" I suppose ? Competition also probably know that and don't pursue this axis. I'm sure they prefer enrolling more newbs and more influencers.

> Schwab doesn't have outages during sell-offs of very visible investments, though.

Yes they have. During one very red day they were down almost all morning (although StreetSmart Edge worked).

Eh ok fine, I take it back, Schwab also has outages. I use Fidelity, though, and to my knowledge, they did not.

Point is, availability is important.

It’s worth noting that fidelity does take payment for order flow for some orders: https://clearingcustody.fidelity.com/app/item/RD_13569_21696...

Schwab had multiple outages during height of the GME craze.

It was not a site wide outage. Only a small handful of stocks could not be ordered.

If that's not putting ones finger on the scale I don't know what is.

Eh, Schwab regularly has outages. Schwab went down five days in a row during the height of the GameStop stupidity, for example.

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