A story of Robin Hood
Once upon a time… I finally decided to invest some money. And I chose Robinhood as my broker. And this is a story of bad Robinhood. In contrast to tales character, it took money from me, but let’s s start from the beginning.
On July 20 I decided transfer 10k to my account. This is just two clicks, a spinner on green background appears and… wait… wait… it failed, the message on a black stripe saying “no connection”. All right, let’s just retry it. I really hope that all of you would do the same. I retried several times, with no luck and contacted support. They replied very fast: there is a problem in their system and they’re fixing it. I’ll retry tomorrow.
Next morning I wake up and see alert from my bank that my account is negative. I owe to bank really bad, I open the history of transactions to see what happened and I see that Robinhood charged me 10k five times, Carl! I’m contacting their support, they’re not responsive this time time, because I believe people with same issues piled up. All right, thank you my old-fashioned-clumsy-bank that you can cleanup mess after cool startup. They even waived fee for cancelling those pending transactions.
There are clearly two bugs in the system and this shouldn’t happen. First, after failure, engineers just decided to replay all failed transactions without any reconcilation. Hope they’re fixing it. Second, there is a limit of 10k per day. Apparently, when they replay the log, code doesn’t check for upper limits. But it should. This is the second bug.
Robinhood was still thinking that those transactions are pending and I contacted them “please revert them, they are not gonna work”. And they did, but happily charged me 30$ per revert. I paid for cleaning up their mess! I contact them again, but no answer now.
There is no way to call them and talk (yell? ☺) I know now, that when it comes to money, I’d better of deal with Vanguard or Schwab. A Russian proverb say, “greedy pays twice”. I was lazy to go through outdated interfaces of classic brokers.
Update: Happy end here: “Robinhood is good!” https://medium.com/@idemura/robinhood-is-good-d1612da480f5
