Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

Re:Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberr... by snowwrestler on Thursday January 28, 2021 @09:53AM (#25942589)

Seeing a comment like this on HN shows the risk here. If people here don’t understand the difficulty in scaling to meet huge spikes in demand, how are ordinary retail investors supposed to understand it?

It’s one thing to handle “a trade.” It’s another thing to handle everyone trying to trade at exactly the same second. We already saw broker apps have issues this week just on handling the buy volume. The sell volume will be far higher.

And I mentioned counterparties too. Even if the technology works, you can’t sell if everyone else is selling too.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberr... by jen20 on Thursday January 28, 2021 @11:12AM (#25944117)

I spent many years building exactly this technology. It's hard, but it is (or should be) table stakes for the industry.

The risk of not finding a counterparty to which to sell is different - and real - which is why I did not disagree with that aspect of your post.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberr... by snowwrestler on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:29PM (#25945277)

Multiple online brokers had outages this week and blamed volume. Whether or not it should be possible, it seems possible.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberr... by themaninthedark on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:47PM (#25945589)

Didn't Parlor just get shutdown because they did not moderate their user base comments fast enough?

If we hold a social media company liable for not being able to scale fast enough shouldn't a company offering financial services be held to at least that level of standard?

[ Parent | on HN ]