Using Two Brokerages May Be Better Than One

[james.hendrickson]

So, the big news this morning is Crowdstrike disseminated a bum update and it shut down a huge part of the economy .

As i see it, this points to the value of diversification in which brokerage and banking accounts people choose to use. For example, Schwab has been able to execute any trades in my account this morning - BUT Robinhood took the orders just fine.

[disneysteve]

Don't put all of your eggs in one basket, as they say.

We do have accounts in various places. We didn't do that for this purpose but it has just worked out that way over the years. If one bank or brokerage were to be unavailable for some reason, there are always other places we could get to money if we needed to. Today's issue didn't impact us at all though.

[ua_guy]

No personal/financial impact today, but work has been a mess. Our IT group has been working on putting things back together all morning after the issue, still not totally solved. DH has been on incident calls for his company since ~midnight, so as of now he's about 12.5 hours into his day, and it's not over yet for them either.

Huge, HUGE money was lost today. I haven't seen any estimated totals, probably because companies are still recovering and/or don't know yet. But it's going to be a number that knocks people's socks off.

[james.hendrickson]

Totally - Crowdstrike is going to be in hot water. If I were some of their clients, I'd kill their contract ASAP.

And they'll likely face massive legal liability - everyone on their mom will want to sue for damages.

[disneysteve]

Huge, HUGE money was lost today.

I haven't followed the news. I know that flights got cancelled and some websites were down. What happened that will result in major financial losses?

[kork13]

I haven't followed the news. I know that flights got cancelled and some websites were down. What happened that will result in major financial losses?

Those issues exactly, plus banks, healthcare, E911 services, & others also. Not necessarily direct costs (though you could say that operating while not being able to conduct business directly cost companies money), but also a great deal of opportunity cost.

I was returning from a business trip when it all started to go down ... Thankfully, I was on a train & it continued without issue. One of my team members flew instead, and was able to return ... But another guy (departing on a separate trip) had his entire trans-Pacific trip disappear out of the airline's system, and he had to rebook mere hours before his flights were supposed to takeoff. It was definitely a messy day. Sounds like it's mostly resolved by now, pending system updates by all of the affected companies. But yes, the Crowd Strike folks are likely gonna max out their liability insurance, and then some.

[bjl584]

The airport here in Pittsburgh was at a standstill when this happened. No impact personally or at work that day though.

I too have accounts in various places but not because I am wary of an IT issue.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Lots of hospitals were down. I know two people waiting on results they couldn't get.

[kork13]

... But another guy (departing on a separate trip) had his entire trans-Pacific trip disappear out of the airline's system, and he had to rebook mere hours before his flights were supposed to takeoff. It was definitely a messy day.

I found out yesterday that this guy's Crowd Strike troubles didn't end with rebooking ... He made it to the states, but apparently got stranded in Wisconsin by the airline, still not fully resolved with their issues... Now 4 days later! Insanity.