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An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

• ablekh 7y ago
  I'm curious about your thoughts on why a technical infrastructure, which, by nature of being cloud-native, is supposed to be (and likely has been) architected as a highly elastic platform, have not stood the test of time in this regard. Based on the in information from Robinhood's careers site, their platform is largely based on the following technology stack: - Python, Django, Django Rest Framework - Go - PostgreSQL - Container and container orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) - Microservice-oriented architectures and related OSS technologies (Kafka, Celery/RabbitMQ, nginx, Redis, Memcached, Airflow, Consul) - Cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, GCP) - Infrastructure as Code and configuration management (Terraform, SaltStack, Ansible, Chef, Puppet) - CI/CD and test automation frameworks (Cypress.io, Jenkins, Appium, UIAutomation, Bazel)
• acchow 7y ago
  Can't wait for the post mortem
  • joobus 7y ago
    I don't think we will get a postmortem. Their lawyers will kill it because it will be an admission of guilt and open them up to even more legal liability.
    • wbl 7y ago
      The SEC did one for Knight Capital.
      • SkyPuncher 7y ago
        Being down for a trading day is not the same as actively selling $440 million in assets.
        • wocram 7y ago
          I would argue that it is worse for a retail brokerage to be down for a day than it is for a trading firm to blow themselves up, though I suppose the latter was more about creating a disorderly market.
  • numlock86 7y ago
    Maybe in another four years when they finally realize they still haven't fixed the leap bug. Didn't work out for this year apparently. Last leap year had the exact same problem. The problem is that the ticket is very low priority because right now it is working again and won't happen again until at least 2024 ... By then it will most likely be forgotten. Again.
• mjs33 7y ago
  Their DNS system failed? How?! Unless DNS stands for “Do Not Sell”
  • tbrock 7y ago
    This happened to us at Hustle years ago. Basically if you run on AWS there’s a DNS server provided inside each VPC that usually works fine but which has no observable load metrics etc... so you don’t really know you are slamming it and are about to have a problem unless you audit your entire codebase. Why? Well that tiny DNS server has certain capacity constraints and if you don’t cache DNS lookups by using a http/https agent for example (in NodeJS) you wind up looking up the same dns info over and over and churning sockets like it’s going out of style. If you run really really hot the poor thing falls over (rightly so). The limits are high and DNS is fast so you usually don’t notice but when you are under load bugs like this come out of the woodwork. When it falls down you look up the AWS docs, lean back in your chair upon finding this isn’t an “elastic” part of AWS and say “FUUUUUUUUCK” so loud it can be heard from outer space. If you are Robinhood though don’t you have some former Netflix SRE/DevOps beast on staff that knows this and so you run your own DNS and monitor it?
    • ajsharp 7y ago
      Wait, what?? There's an invisible DNS server running inside your VPC? I get what you're saying wrt cached DNS lookups but this seems wild.
      • ra1n85 7y ago
        It's a DNS resolver that runs on the hypervisor hosting every instance.
        • tbrock 7y ago
          Yes and they limit you to throwing 1024 packets per second per network interface at it. Of course you could run your own dns cache per host/pod whatever.
• egdod 7y ago
  Pretty light on information.
• rhizome 7y ago
  Is every bitcoin company run by ex cellphone store employees? Just the exchanges?
  • dickjocke 7y ago
    Robinhood isn't a bitcoin company. That's just a feature they have. Its main product offering is the commision free trading--and their presence pushed a lot of big players to adopt the same offering. The wallstreetbets gang is silly and all, but I think they have really democratized stock trading, and made the whole idea seem much more accesible. I think they founders are former finance guys. I hope this doesn't sound like guerilla marketing. I don't even use the app, I have used it but I'm just not that interested in picking stocks. I just think it's cool as an ex-code monkey to entreprenur story.
    • triceratops 7y ago
      > I think they have really democratized stock trading I would think Vanguard did that already. Most people should be trading ETFs, not individual stocks.
      • ska 7y ago
        That's a separate issue I think. They obviously do different things.
      • idnefju 7y ago
        I believe you still need a broker for ETFs, which usually carry brokerage fees.
        • ksherlock 7y ago
          With mutual fund companies, including Vanguard, generally you can open an account directly with them and buy directly from them (including partial shares, automatic monthly purchases, and dividend/capital gain reinvestments).
        • 7y ago
• ilrwbwrkhv 7y ago
  wasnt this cause by leap year and them not taking that into account?
  • beart 7y ago
    Not according to the linked blog post.
  • wyxuan 7y ago
    I feel like it was that and a bunch of other things that led to this
  • illnewsthat 7y ago
    They denied that on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434 https://twitter.com/AskRobinhood/status/1234861941413351434
    • tomc1985 7y ago
      So what of the screenshot in the original twitter post? Was it doctored? Showing GMT?
      • ajhurliman 7y ago
        I don't know if it had anything to do with leap year, but I also checked dev tools and saw the same issue (requests for market data on March 3, 2020 on March 2, 2020 8AM PST). However, it was busted for both the website as well as the Android app (and I'm guessing iOS too) so it doesn't seem like it's purely a client-side problem unless all of their clients were built from the same source.
• 0xy 7y ago
  Still silence on the traders who lost tens of thousands of dollars? Are they going to be compensating or not? This blog post doesn't appear to say anything. It's not an apology, it's not an explanation, it doesn't say what they're going to do in response. This is after the incident in which there was no status updates or support availability for multiple hours of time. Why can't they commit to updates every hour or every 30 minutes?
  • ska 7y ago
    I agree the level of feedback isn't great, but what would people be compensated for? Did they misplace actual orders?
    • cdurth 7y ago
      Yesterday was the largest upswing in market history and the entirety of RH missed out.
      • majormajor 7y ago
        "Missed out" doesn't seem like the right phrase here. If you already owned the stock, you still held it, no? So people who were going to continue to sell off got lucky that they couldn't make that trade, and people who were going to buy got unlucky? Does anyone seriously expect compensation, or think that it's deserved, or is it group wishful thinking? How would it even work? Would they just take people's word for their supposed intent? Or are people wanting some sort of "here's a gift card" type deal? This is not to defend RobinHood - I've personally kept my money with well-established companies cause conservative, old, proven systems seem like a good thing for a product in this space - but shit happens, no? There will be more good days, and more bad days, in the market, it's a long-run game anyway, and it's pretty easy to vote with your wallet in this space.
        • cx4life 7y ago
          There could be folks holding leveraged Bear ETFs or similar after last week's downturn, who were waiting to see how the market moved Monday morning to decide whether to sell or hold. I could see those folks losing quite a bit of money due to the inability to sell off those types of positions after the market reversed course on Monday. I suspect you're right though, that it's mostly sour grapes concerning the opposite case - inability to buy as the market rallied.
• LaserToy 7y ago
  Blame the load. If only Robinhood were not famous for saying they are hiring only the best... The best do not go down like that.
  • vsareto 7y ago
    That’s always marketing speak and never to be believed.
• dilly_li 7y ago
  Start from the email notification. They have been asking themselves the easy questions. Just look at the top questions in their email: * Are the funds in my account safe? Yes, your funds are safe. * Was my personal information affected? No, your personal information was not affected. * Can I use my Robinhood debit card? Yes. If you have a debit card, you should have been—and should still be able to—use your card, but you may have had issues receiving notifications, viewing your balance, and seeing transactions in your app. ------------ The real question is: How is Robinhood compensating for the missed trades? Stop asking yourself the easy questions, RH.
  • neom 7y ago
    I had to wait on hold for well over an hour to get through to the HSBC trading desk, HSBC isn't going to compensate me.
    • driverdan 7y ago
      Wait, people still trade over the phone?
      • Scoundreller 7y ago
        Dunno about HSBC, but in Canada, often you have to call your broker when you want to sell a stock on a different market than you bought it. E.g. Buying TD in Canada, and wanting to sell on NYSE for US$.
  • throwsprtsdy 7y ago
    I think it's unlikely that Robinhood (or any brokerage) would compensate people for losses on hypothetical trades that could have been made during an outage. Such a policy would allow customers to pick their entry and exit points, and extract money from the brokerage at will. Even if the trades were well-defined at the time the outage occurred, there would still be an asymmetry between people demanding compensation on their profitable trades while eschewing losses on their bad trades. It's doubtful any brokerage would be willing to eat that. Execution risk is a risk.
• buryat 7y ago
  > Traditionally depicted dressed in Lincoln green, he is said to have robbed from the rich and given to the poor. Does the name still stand?
• jsf01 7y ago
  I’d be interested to read a deep technical post-mortem like those which have become fairly standard among other big tech companies. Hoping Robinhood does the right thing here.
• aloknnikhil 7y ago
  Genuine question: With no commission trading at places like Schwab and eTrade, is it even worth trading on Robinhood? For as far as I could remember (about 2 years ago), Robinhood has always failed to scale.
  • manigandham 7y ago
    Options are completely free on Robinhood while they still have a per-contract fee at other brokerages. If you don't care about that then no, there's no reason to stick with Robinhood.
    • benmanns 7y ago
      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 another broker who _doesn't_ charge these, please let me know. If you're first for the broker I'll give you $20 for the tip.
      • Itsdijital 7y ago
        Trust me, please trust me, you really really really want to be paying a competent broker when trading options. If it's chump change you're trading, sure, use RH. If it's serious money, the $0.65/contract or whatever pays for itself many times over. Even if it's just the ability to regularly get filled between the spread it pays for itself.
        • jzl 7y ago
          Yeah, there seems to be no end to the horror stories of options trades on Robinhood having significant delays before being filled, costing people far, far more than 65 cents. You get what you pay for.
        • 7y ago
• jennyyang 7y ago
  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 week and load problems go away once the load disappears. They probably had a lot less load the rest of the day, so the fact they were down the entire day suggests it was something else. I would need a fully transparent post mortem before I believed anything they said.
  • solidasparagus 7y ago
    Failures due to high load can take a while to resolve - you often need to fix the broken infrastructure, process the backlog, and catch up to live.
    • hcknwscommenter 7y ago
      You can't process the backlog on a trading platform. If i put in a trade at 2:20 pm and the system goes down, I don't want my trade to execute next morning at market open. That's insane. Especially the RH flavor of YOLO infinite leverage call option nonsense.
      • radicaldreamer 7y ago
        Exactly, you have to default to fill or kill within the trading day. You just can’t treat certain products like a standard queue... sometimes time is the most important component
        • stiglitz 7y ago
          FYI, FillOrKill/ImmediateOrCancel are not the same as a day order. FoK/IoC means “do not queue this order”. It’s immediately filled (or not) (or, for IoC, partially) based on whatever orders are already in the book, and then you’re done. Whereas a day order is queued until the end of the day or until it’s filled, whichever comes first.
• tempsy 7y ago
  Sad that there isn’t an actual apology anywhere to be found in the letter at all. And now with the fed rate cut the interest on cash is only 1.3%, with more cuts expected later in the year, which was the last big differentiator. I don’t see how they don’t see massive net withdrawals going forward.
  • GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
    Yeah because if they're culpable then they can be sued via class-action
  • CamelCaseName 7y ago
    > And now with the fed rate cut the interest on cash is only 1.3%, with more cuts expected later in the year, which was the last big differentiator. I don’t see how they don’t see massive net withdrawals going forward. This isn't really an issue because the fed rate cut impacts everyone. Other institutions will cut their interest rates as well. I know of a few banks (Canadian) that have already lowered their GIC rates. If anything, this is actually good for RH. Now instead of comparing 1.8% at RH and 1% at another Financial Institution, you're comparing 1.3% and 0.5% -- a much bigger multiple.
    • tempsy 7y ago
      most brokerages don’t actually pay anything. With another cut it’s going to be <1% vs 0%. Hardly anything even with a six figure balance. That’s my point.
• lemmox 7y ago
  I'm always amazed by how tricky DNS failures can be.
• dang 7y ago
  Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22468361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22468361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465178
• VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
  every time I see a company that has "co-CEOs" I always wonder what kind of weird stuff is going on in that company
  • winrid 7y ago
    Wasn't Steve Jobs a "co-CEO" of Apple for a while? (Edit, I mean after he came back from NeXT)
• alishan-l 7y ago
  I heard it was related to the leap year. Apparently they had downtime 4 years ago as well.
• mkchoi212 7y ago
  It's cool that the founders of the company publish blog posts like this for a short outage. Hope other CEOs learn from this and become even more transparent in the future :D
  • manigandham 7y ago
    Short outage? They were down for almost the entire trading yesterday and hours today. And there's barely any transparency in this post compared to standard post-mortems.
    • rpdillon 7y ago
      Was this their post-mortem? I didn't see anything to indicate that.
  • tmpz22 7y ago
    A day long outage for a $7B company is a big deal. They don’t deserve credit for this.
  • tomc1985 7y ago
    It was a useless puff piece that said absolutely nothing of interest. How is that worthy of a pat on the back?
• xyst 7y ago
  The boys down in the salt mines of WSB will want a blood sacrifice. Founders should be fired. CTO/CIO should be replaced.
• Itsdijital 7y ago
  I have mixed feelings of sympathy about this whole RH thing. Anyone who has used RH regularly should be well aware of how inept it is. Any spikes in volume or volatility, even on a single stock, bring it to it's knees pretty often. Like not just the last week, but even during calm periods. I've personally lost 20-30% on positions solely because RH was bugging out, thankfully I use RH just for "fun trades" usually <$100. I cannot fathom having the balls to trade any real amount of money on the platform while being aware of these long term issues. On the flipside I feel for new users and perhaps even generally inactive users who weren't aware of RH's incredible flakiness. I'd imagine (or hope to) the losses of most of those users were small, assuming they were new or casual and just testing the waters. Even if one of my small plays hit it big on RH, the money would just go to my main account on TD (which has been smooth all week shy of a few hiccups Fri morning during record volume). It's been obvious for a long time that RH should not and cannot be trusted. If you're trading options with a $60K account on RH, well, I don't even have words for that level of ignorance.
  • 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
    It’s another example of why DevOps has become a buzzword and most teams just pay lip service to it.
    • UncleMeat 7y ago
      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.
      • Itsdijital 7y ago
        Robinhood crashing isn't an isolated unfortunate "well it happens to everyone" moment. RH has constantly had issues at least since I started using it over a year ago. I didn't notice it really at first, but I also didn't know much about anything trading related back then. It didn't take long though for me to have my first "incident" where my market orders were seemingly vanishing into the abyss as the underlying moved. I'm not talking seconds, I'm talking minutes. For a market order on high liquidity options. Never mind trying to get filled at anything besides the ask (buying) or bid (selling). RH has had serious underlying issues for a long time now. This incident didn't happen in vacuum. The writing has been in huge block letters on the wall for a long time.
• deleted 7y ago
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• RestlessMind 7y ago
  This is such an empty update. At the very least, they should have published a detailed postmortem or committed to one by a certain date. How are we supposed to know that they have learned their lessons?
  • harikb 7y ago
    I don’t work for them, but I am pretty sure we can blame the litigious nature of this industry for the lack of detail in the postmortem. Not everyone can afford to be cloudflare :) Even for Cloudflare, I thought the company will get sued out of existence after the proxy data leak, but finance industry/SEC etc is a completely different ballgame.
    • dx034 7y ago
      I believe it's the fear of litigation rather than actual litigation. Other companies also manage to publish postmortems and don't get sued out of existence.
  • elliekelly 7y ago
    The compliance world isn’t quite as fast-moving as tech. Even a “high priority” business continuity post mortem at a financial institution is going to take at least a week for all of the lawyers & senior management to agree on the language.
• shiado 7y ago
  Does Robinhood have stop-loss orders an if so did they execute when it was down?
• yaur 7y ago
  "That in turn led to a “thundering herd” effect—triggering a failure of our DNS system." I'm just a spectator but I can not imagine that this was somehow caused by a DNS failure.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • zippergz 7y ago
    I’m not sure I can even count the number of outages I’ve been involved in that had DNS issues as at least part of the cause.
    • yaur 7y ago
      sure, I've seen outages that are caused by DNS config problems. But I don't think I've ever seen one caused by a "thundering herd" overwhelming DNS servers. Another give away that this is a lie is that support emails were getting a stock postfix error message which means that MX records at least were resolving.
• czbond 7y ago
  On the profession side of this, if you're an engineer at RH in the thick of this - many have been there. It seems dire now, but in a few years the fog, panic, and haze of no sleep will become a story you tell your peers at happy hour. Many will cast stones - but they have been there too. If they haven't, well maybe their day will also come. You may feel bad at the moment - but the best way professionally forward is "We try our best tomorrow"
  • kerng 7y ago
    Reminds me of the book Showstopper and the personal stories in - its about the creation of Windows NT. Pretty interesting how things where not so differnet some 30 years ago In case anyone is interested: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717 https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
    • dmix 7y ago
      Interesting, so it took 5yrs, $150-million, and 250-employees to get NT shipped. Adding this one to my reading list!
  • cheschire 7y ago
    If this were an outage directly caused by a natural disaster, I could understand. This outage was an availability problem. This clearly points to some prioritization problems within the leadership layers if robust and resilient infrastructure was not emphasized. The prioritization problems may not be due to ignorance or malice though, and may be justifiable if there are other fires that are burning brighter. It's still pointing to problems though, and I think it's completely legitimate for engineers to question the stability of the company when this sort of thing happens. At the very least as an engineer I would be asking some pointed questions of my leadership. Maybe not dusting off the resume yet, but still I'd want to get reassurance from internally that the leadership problems that caused this are being addressed.
    • malux85 7y ago
      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 I'm talking about a 200 node hadoop cluster thats doing the electrical metering and billing for 8 million people, and is NOT allowed to stop. Or the trading platform thats running sub millisecond trades and downtime means 300,000 $ USD per minute. These are systems I have engineered over the last 10 years, and I can say: These things are complex and have failures in 1000 different ways, and while you're monitoring 999 of them that one thing you're not looking at is festering under the surface (your monitoring system is tracking IRQ hardware interrupt response times, right???) Part of being in a team is everyone pulling together, and yes it's stressful at the time, but even very good management cant see all ends, just like very good engineering cant predict everything. I don't think it's useful to start pointing the finger at management and "asking some pointed questions at leadership" because sometimes everyone is doing their best. Yes we should analyse our failures so we can do better, but your tone is very accusatory, and I believe that a better approach is an all inclusive chat about how we can do better, and management saying "great job engineering" for fixing it, and giving them a break after the stressful event.
• bayonetz 7y ago
  Just use Square’s Cash App! Free stock trades AND you can buy fractional shares AND a bunch of other stuff like P2P payments and bitcoin. I work there and so can say with some authority that we can handle more volume without going down than RH can.
  • kortilla 7y ago
    Everyone is a Super Bowl winner when they’re armchair quarterbacking.
  • minimaxir 7y ago
    If you actually work at Square, it's poor form to advertise in this manner.
    • pensatoio 7y ago
      Or they’re just taking pride in their work?
      • bayonetz 7y ago
        Indeed!
    • redis_mlc 7y ago
      Actually, bayonetz's posting is the only useful one in the comments for this article. Most of us are here for information from actual industry insiders, and this qualifies. Here's some more inside info ... If your "financial app" provider doesn't have a banking charter, run. None of the recent trendy fintech companies have a charter, and are thus clown cars.
      • astura 7y ago
        Fidelity offers banking services and doesn't have a banking charter but they aren't a "clown car," they are one of the largest financial institutions in the world.
    • 7y ago
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• 0xDEEPFAC 7y ago
  "Multiple factors contributed to the unprecedented load that ultimately led to the outages. The factors included, among others, highly volatile and historic market conditions; record volume; and record account sign-ups. " What a sad press release, I am sure people at their corporate office were sweating over this. The long and short of it is that users trusted the service would work and had possibly a great deal invested only to get a comment when everything breaks down deflecting blame "OMG we weren't prepared for what our users did!" We live in a sad state of software. I expect things like this and the Equifax scandal to continue if things like software security, reliability, and performance aren't taken into account.
• RayVR 7y ago
  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 acquired.) I have also seen brokers screw over individuals on a significant scale without real ramifications. 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. To the people thinking they should be compensated in some way...If you are doing >$1m daily volume, maybe you can contact them to see what they can do but even then, I doubt it. The way this should be handled is to have multiple executing brokers. You can implement offsetting positions if needed and transfer positions when your main account becomes available, if you are using a broker that can clear. Right now it seems Robinhood is working to implement clearing but you could still go to neutral or put on your positions.
  • twic 7y ago
    > 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.
    • whb07 7y ago
      multi hour isn't day and a half.
• homero 7y ago
  This is common in Bitcoin exchanges. Never thought I'd see a stock broker go down but i guess it's the same issues.
• vinaypai 7y ago
  Historic... Unprecedented... Thundering herd, a bunch of excuses to explain why they couldn't handle the volume that most real brokerages handle every second.
• sitzkrieg 7y ago
  volatility always shakes out the trading companies with lame infrastructure
• c930 7y ago
  dnsmasq is your friend.
• dirtydroog 7y ago
  Companies like Robinhood regularly go down when markets are volatile. It was quite frustrating when the financial crisis was in full swing not being able to log in to my trading account. I reckon I would have made a killing.
• shrimpx 7y ago
  Wow this is Coinbase in 2017. Trading mass hysteria takes down unprepared Silicon Valley trading service.
• deleted 7y ago
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• McTossOut 7y ago
  I actually moved off Robinhood for much less egregious engineering violations like a month ago. The amount of "cosmetic flaws" they let seep into their app makes the data untrustworthy. It was a high quality stepping stone, I learned alot and made some good returns, there's honestly a lot going for it.
• lowdose 7y ago
  Did any of the complaining people actually pay RH for their service or is this 1st world entitlement?
• gadders 7y ago
  I mean this is OK as an apology, but is there an actual post mortem anywhere was can read?
• vbtemp 7y ago
  On Reddit I've been trying to ask this ELI5: Why would you use RH instead of a normal, mainstream brokerage like Vanguard, Fidelity, etc that already has (1) an app and (2) commission-free trades?
  • lkbm 7y ago
    Easy answer: As someone who's used Vanguard for index funds and the like for a couple decades now, I had no idea they had an app or commission-free trades. They don't market this at all. As a secondary answer, normal, mainstream brokerages have pretty bad tech, tbh. I don't expect it to be worse than Robinhood in terms of things like security, and I expect UX to be worse. (Side note: I just discovered that Vanguard actually has a secret security key option hidden under Account maintenance, so I can finally switch from sms 2fa. +1 to Vanguard.)
    • infinite8s 7y ago
      > Side note: I just discovered that Vanguard actually has a secret security key option hidden under Account maintenance, so I can finally switch from sms 2fa. +1 to Vanguard. It looks like you still need security codes setup: "You'll need to register for both security codes and security keys, however. That's because keys and codes go hand in hand—if you lose your key or don't have it, we'll need to send you a code in order for you to log on. In addition, you'll always need a code to access your accounts from a mobile device." If an attacker can skip the security key you might as well not use one.
  • fny 7y ago
    My brother has a Fidelity account and apparently even he was blocked from putting in orders online last Thursday, so I'm not sure they're immune either.
• Ambele 7y ago
  I can't help but think this glitch was a good thing and Robinhood investors would do better if they traded less anyhow. According to an OpenFolio correlational study, traders who trade more than 12 times per year make 0.5% less than traders who trade less than 12 times per year. OpenFolio was one of the first three websites to have an API integration with Robinhood portfolios.