Apparently, a āāātechnical errorā caused the US free Trading App to go offline for two days, freezing millions of customers assets. It was Frozen. Locked Down.
Investors (mainly shorters) lost thousands of dollars not being able to get out of positions.
Conspiracy theories suggest the framework was hacked or the system glitched due to bad coding not able to handle the leap year. (wtf?!)
Of course, Robin Hoodās development team deny this butā¦ if this can happen to an established platform of millions of users in the US, is it not worying for its pending UK rollout?
Because loads of investing platforms suddenly experiencing ātechnical difficultiesā during extremely turbulent market conditions doesnāt sound suspicious at all
It is the very message my companyās CEO told us once at the staff meeting. A lot of the systems at the brokers in the past 10 years have not been build to adapt a sharp rise of volume and volatility because we live in a world of low rate, low vol and low active trading. All will change once the tide changes. He blames that to ETFs being ādumpā in both directions of the market.
Hargreaves Lansdown has also seen issues this morning - many features are not working including buying and selling, Direct Debits have been delayed too for some reason. Limit orders and linked accounts are still broken on HL, and there were similar issues last week.
I suspect most customer-facing brokers are going to find it hard to keep up with sudden spikes in volume as almost all their customers check their portfolio and gets quotes for buying/selling - even just the huge increase in checks on portfolio value and prices could cause problems, without the increase in orders and volatile prices.
I want to praise Freetrade team on a day like this. Robinhood had some serious issues with its app yet Freetrade, a much smaller company is striding through today with no issues on its app. Quite an achievement!
The YouTuberās of a more mature age that Iāve seen in the states say they canāt take Robinhood as a main long term brokerage or their investments as they do not offer a Roth IRA and they plan to launch here without an ISA account. Tax protected accounts are so important for long term investors.
Well a year and a half ago i must admit - i felt the same way about upcoming disruptor, FreeTrade.
So as a hedge, thatās why i have a longstanding Hargreaves account and an account with debutant FreeTrade.
HLās online dealing service hasnāt gone down since 1999. With that pedigree it gave me some piece of mind ā¦ but a part of me wanted a piece of that debutanteās 0% commision sweet apple pie
So moral of the story - have both accounts - one for my SIPP / ISAs and one for throwing money at lots of cheap anf cheerful 0% commision trades. If Iām not able to trade in FT one day, i just buy it in my HL ISAā¦
I will have a Freetrade ISA forever but will also use other platforms. Good for us and good for the platforms. It just sits right with me.
I will spread over 3 platforms.
All funnelled in Via ISAās. (1 per tax year).
The previous outage was just ridiculousā¦ The devs had the exact same issue 4 years ago because the code wasnāt programmed with leap years in mind or something to that effectā¦ Crazy!
TradeStation only for speculating on Futures (e-micro and e-minis) HL and iii.co.uk (Iāve had both since 2007, slowly moving away from them lol)
There were a few tail events when other platforms went down e.g. Brexit result day, HL was offline in the morning. Stocks gapped down huge. I wanted to pick up some. IBKR saved the day for me.
