Boy, talk about a huge rally today! Largest comeback of all time. Seems like something close to 3% of today’s rally in the S&P 500 index came from a large rally in the last hour of trading. That’s big, and it probably put a smile on many faces after they looked at their portfolio and 401(k) accounts. That was a welcome change after one week of brutal 3% and 4% down days, leading to the S&P 500 ending the week in an official correction.
And while today was a happy day for some, for others who hold brokerage trading accounts with Robinhood, it was anything but happy. I being one of these poor chaps. You see, Robinhood suffered one of their worst outages ever that I can recall, a system-wide outage that lasted the whole trading day and beyond. If you wanted to do anything with your portfolio account but were with Robinhood, there was nothing you could do today. Taking a look at the posted system status for the Robinhood platform, you would have been hard-pressed to find a single useful part of the platform that was functioning.
There is an old saying that goes, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” For those investors whose one basket was Robinhood, today this old adage was loud and clear in its meaning. For me, this is giving me another reason, on top of others including the lot selection feature, or lack thereof, to explore other brokerage options. Robinhood was, and in some ways still is, a good option for many beginner investors. But the more you start using it, the more the cracks become visible in its missing functionality.
Today is a simple reminder to us all. Just like the old adage of investing that says diversify your portfolio, it may very well be in our best interest to diversify our brokerage firms. Hope you all find a replacement basket to put some of your future eggs in.