[humanlion87]

If companies like Robinhood don't come along, how do you think disruption in the financial market will happen? If we always go back to the existing players, rate of innovation will be so slow (especially in the financial market). And it's obvious that startups will not have the same amount of assets that century old companies have. But JPMorgan or BofA did not earn their trillions overnight. In fact, we can even say they have screwed over more people than Robinhood has.

I am not trying to say what Robinhood did was correct or that they have not done any mistakes. I am just saying that I am glad that companies like Robinhood exist because otherwise the entrenched players would have never taken any steps to innovate.

[totalZero]

Is an obsession with "disruption" over "improvement" wise for a system that moves hundreds of billions of dollars every day?

We were on T+3 a few years ago. Now we're on T+2. That wasn't the result of some whiny blog post, it was the result of gradual and careful operational improvements. There's a lot of work that goes on in the back and middle offices of those century-old companies.

[jabbany]

I don't think that the OP is arguing for "always" sticking to entrenched players, but rather for people to face the reality that the agility of startups come with drawbacks in their service (even though it's often not apparent).

It all comes down to making informed decisions. If you're just using RH for "playing around" with some surplus money, this lack of liquidity shouldn't be as important for you (as compared to, e.g., the ease of use, or low fees...). However, if you're using RH in a "serious" capacity, this (reliability) should definitely be something to seriously consider, since you may not have the guarantees that you can take for granted with traditional players.

The true problem with the RH situation is the lack of transparency throughout. It really does no good (and comes off as very "slimy") if third parties have to expose their business model or why they're having issues. A little transparency would have gone a long way for people to be sympathetic to the startup. But then again, I guess that harms the "magic" factor of a startup.

[tmotwu]

I agree with your sentiment, but for people who have used RH for a while, this is basically par for the course as far as RH support/PR goes. I'm surprised people haven't dumped them in the past for their reliability issues, and they shouldn't get a pass for this event either. For instance, Amazon wasn't the first e-commerce or compute resource provider either. Their competency and dedication to customers have put them ten steps ahead.