Robinhood is down, and yes – they missed an entire trading day, people are furious, but I still love them…and here’s why

People angry at Robinhood

So…if you’re working at Robinhood today, you’ve had better days. The popular online stock trading service has been down for the entire day and yes, for those looking at a clock, the market is now closed. This has to be some kind of record since I can’t remember Fidelity or Charles Schwab ever having an outage like this.

Robinhood, a stock app popular with millennials, crashed when markets opened on Monday, and missed the entire trading day. The stock trading app’s status is still down, its outage prompting thousands of furious investors to vent on social media, as they wonder when Robinhood will be back up.(Source – FORTUNE)
Robinhood major outage

Some people on Twitter are starting to get pretty darn angry, here’s some recent tweets:

Robinhood Class Action Lawsuit

Robinhood crashing issues

Robinhood Forbes on outage

Okay, so why is it that I still love Robinhood? When I started using Robinhood I knew they were a startup, last week they were a startup and today, yup – still a startup. Having worked in the startup world since I was fifteen, I know that startups do have ups and downs and things can happen that would probably never happen at a big company.

The tradeoff here is that startups can also move quickly and innovate in amazing ways. Robinhood has hands-down the best UX of any trading app I’ve used, they have lightning fast money transfers and have added a bevy of new features that I really like.

But…since Robinhood is a startup, I knew something like this could happen. So I keep the vast majority of my stock portfolio at Fidelity, which is, well – not a startup. I keep about 5% of the money I have invested in the stock market in Robinhood, it’s that simple.

On days like today, or if a year from now, Robinhood goes down again, I’ll be a-okay if I want to sell most of my portfolio. I think the challenge is, a lot of people thought that Robinhood was past this point, they put them in the same boat as the big well-trusted solutions like Fidelity or Schwab, and they’re clearly not there yet.

So yes, I get it. If you made Robinhood your main trading platform, you’re pretty pissed right now, but I’d also say you probably should have known that as a startup, things like this could happen and take it with a grain of salt. I know this is hard to stomach now but if you really didn’t want to deal with the problems that a startup has, you should have stuck with Fidelity or Schwab, otherwise you need to know that things like this can and do happen in startupland.

There, that’s my two cents. I still love you Robinhood, and I’ll continue to be a customer, but I sure am glad I didn’t have more than 5% of my stock portfolio with you, and today is the reason why.

Oh and last but not least, this is one thing I do really appreciate about domain investing and why the vast majority of my investment dollars go into domain names. Nothing like this can ever happen in the domain name world, our portfolio values don’t drop like crazy or rise to the moon in a day, and sure, we don’t have the same liquidity, but we also don’t have to go on this crazy rollercoaster ride they call the stock market. So I’m feeling pretty thankful today in more ways than one.

What do you think? Should Robinhood customers have known what they were getting into or is it time to grab the pitchforks and head for the Robinhood HQ? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton