Remember when at a party there was this hot girl who for no logical reason was making out with you and eventually had sex in the closet? (With you, for God's sake!!) It turned out that she was having revenge sex and as a special gift to you transferred STD to you in the process. The point of the story is this: When something looks like an incredible deal, it is probably too good to be true, and you should pass on it. When you can't figure out how a company makes money, then YOU ARE the product. Case in point, RobinHood brokerage. Millions of morons signed up for no commission trade, and it was good, until it got bad. The bad came in this Leap year, when their algorithm didn't recognize the extra day and yesterday March 3rd was still in the future. Thus there was no trade execution!!! What is even better, the exact same problem happened 4 years ago and these morons never learnt!!! They never fixed the problem!! In the process, the commission free trading became painfully expensive for thousands of traders, when the market rallied 1300 Dow points, and they couldn't get out of their positions. So in short: Don't be a bollock, and don't trade at kiddie brokerages.
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The Leap Year is not the reason why RH was down. They had data up until 9:33am EST yesterday so that is totally inaccurate.
Prepared traders have multiple brokers and therefore the ability to hedge against/mitigate these events. It's not a matter of if but when it will happen. Same with your computer. Do you have a fully functioning second system you can use? What about your Internet? Got something there too? What about if your house got burnt down? What happens if your local district lost power? etc. Fail to plan = plan to fail.
I posted another Reddit post explaining it in the RH Outage thread. (Edit: link posted 2 posts below) But even if that wasn't the reason, the point is that their outage was much longer than any other broker, and they don't have a trading desk to call up and get you out of position. You get what you pay for.
Shit can happen everywhere, but then you have a phone, you call your broker and they execute your trade. Try that with RH. But the real sin was that the SAME shit happened TWICE!!!
Yet the exact same shit happened 4 years ago. Tide goes in, tide goes out, you can't explain that. For future reference post #43 and #44 explains it better: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/robinhood-outage-all-day.341059/page-5#post-5026297 It is possible they couldn't handle the volume, but my point still stands: Don't use shitty brokers, or you will pay for it.