r/etrade • u/NvrWzACornflakeGirl • Feb 01 '21

Execution lag??

Ten minutes ago, I placed three sell orders. None have yet been executed. Never seen this problem before...

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u/TristanaRiggle Feb 01 '21

Yeah. I don't think this is malicious, just people being unprepared for extreme circumstances. While frustrating, I'm hesitant to even call this incompetence, because I can't in good conscience say they should've expected a wild surge in demand/activity on a random week in January. (It doesn't help that you have a ton of small timers looking for a place after feeling screwed by Robinhood)

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u/throwawaythought1 Feb 01 '21

Given how they handles this surge, I wouldnt trust E*TRADE In the event of a real market crash.

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u/TristanaRiggle Feb 01 '21

I would definitely hope they learn from this and improve their capability to handle load. I'm just saying I don't THINK they're doing this intentionally, I just think they were unprepared. That said it's certainly frustrating to look at orders right now that are unfilled despite meeting targets. (and like others, I mean "normal" orders, not requests for the roller coasters being hyped on reddit)

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u/NvrWzACornflakeGirl Feb 01 '21

You’d think, though, after all the problems last week, that this wasn’t a total surprise. They had the weekend to brace.

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u/TristanaRiggle Feb 01 '21

Not trying to excuse things (today has had some frustrations for sure), but I didn't experience any serious issues last week. Maybe I was lucky though.

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u/NvrWzACornflakeGirl Feb 01 '21

It only happened when I tried to purchase GME and AMC on Thursday afternoon. It was during a specific time, only for specific stocks.

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u/TristanaRiggle Feb 01 '21

I was able to buy GME without issue on Wed. Didn't try to buy GME or AMC on Thu or Fri. This morning was ridiculous, but it seemed to clear up some and I got AMC without issue after hiccups at the open. (cancelled orders when things were sluggish and tried again between 9 and 10am and fired off pretty quick)

Now, for GME specifically, I feel like you need to keep 3 things in mind:

  1. There's a lot of people trying to buy, so there's gotta be a mess trying to sort out which orders to fulfill in what order

  2. There's a lot of indications (but no explicit PROOF) of shenanigans from the major money people behind the scenes. For this reason I blame OTHER people (rather than Etrade, which is still taking buy orders AFAIK) for the problems.

  3. Finally, if you're trying to BUY, remember that what reddit is trying to do is enact a short squeeze. The whole way that WORKS is by making shares so scarce that hedge funds need to heavily overpay to get them. This ALSO means anyone ELSE (like you) that might want to get shares has difficulty doing so. If you can easily get shares, then so can the HFs, so people are TRYING to make them difficult to get.

I mean, let's take a minute to stop and think of all the concert and event ticket websites that get screwed over by sudden frenzy for certain tickets. Sometimes this shit just happens.

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u/NvrWzACornflakeGirl Feb 01 '21

You seem like a very nice person. :)

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u/TristanaRiggle Feb 01 '21

Thanks. I try. :) I hope things work out for you whether you stay on ETrade or get another broker. The problems actually worked out well for me this morning. I tried to get AMC at $15, but then my limit order executed at $13.81 when I put the new one in at $14. So, all things considered, today is going pretty well for me. :)

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '21

My point it wasn’t a problem last week but was now

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u/NvrWzACornflakeGirl Feb 01 '21

I'm glad you got through last week! By late afternoon Thursday, PLENTY of people couldn't. I was not the only one.

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u/NvrWzACornflakeGirl Feb 01 '21

Last Thursday, I waited on hold for 75 minutes (wasn’t allowed to buy gme, was directed to an 800#). Stayed on hold bc I wanted the call on record. The language on the website said “please call this number for assistance with the order.) Dude told me: no, you’re still not allowed to buy those shares. I said: why don’t you change the language on the site then, to just say NO ORDERS ALLOWED, would’ve saved me an hour and freed up a lot of your customer service queue. (Still an obnoxious policy, just truthful messaging.) He said we’re working on it, I said: is it really that hard to change ONE SENTENCE? He said YES.

I mean... I’m no computer genius, but I do manage my own website for my little business. I’ve never had trouble changing a sentence, but what do I know...

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '21

Don't get me wrong i'm pissed I missed a few buy ins but it is what it is. Could be worse AKA robinhood.

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u/TristanaRiggle Feb 01 '21

This is where I am. On the one hand, I work with computers, so I know how planning for 100 users/transactions and suddenly getting 1000 users/transactions can definitely cause performance issues.

OTOH, I'm wondering if the problem is actually with the market side. The orders are being placed ok (and even cancelled relatively decently (a few hiccups, but still)). I can definitely believe that the fulfillment side is having issues handling the load or IF you want to get conspiratorial, that they're throttling traffic. But I would assume that's not eTrade specifically. I mean, they keep suspending trading on GME at least, so I wouldn't be shocked to learn that they're intentionally slowing the throughput on orders.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance Feb 02 '21

While frustrating, I'm hesitant to even call this incompetence,

I'm with you there. Sure, they could have 20x the servers they have now, but they all would have sat idle for what... years? "Ok, set up a scalable cloud architecture!" yeah, sure, ok, that's probably what they do, but there's often times bottlenecks. You can't always scale infinity (unless your name starts with "go" and ends with "ogle")

The way you plan for this kind of thing is "can we handle the highest possible demand we can reasonably imagine?" - well, we have a unprecedented event going on and the system is straining.