As the markets surged during the positive vaccine reports, the investors and brokers found themselves obstructed and foiled. It has been reported that the investors and brokers from around the world were unable to place any trades on the major trading markets.
From the United States of America, the inability to perform trades were reported by the brokers and investors for Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and Merrill Edge.
From the United Kingdom, the investors and brokers were unable to perform trades for Fidelity UK, Hargreaves Lansdown, and AJ Bell.
The brokers and investors from all of the above markets reported massive slow-downs and delays in placing their trades.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened as it has now become a common occurrence for online traders. Whenever there are reports of market surges and increases in trade volumes, the online investors/brokers started reporting delays and slow-downs.
However, the main reason and factor of the delays and slow-downs have nothing to do with the markets directly. It is actually a problem with the infrastructure that is adopted and provided by the brokers and brokerages. On several occasions when issues were reported by the investors and brokers, it was established that the platforms provided by the platforms were not capable enough.
Due to the surge in trades, the platforms are unable to withstand the high amount of investors logging into the platform in one go and perform trades. These platforms are only capable of supporting a small number of investors/brokers in one go.
Another factor for the lag and delays is the data that flows out of the exchanges during trade surges in the markets. Due to such a large volume of transactions flowing out of the platform, many times the data gets blown up, which is again the fault with the infrastructure.
The co-founder of tastyworks Tom Sosnoff also stated that on many occasions they have observed that the exchanges start posting messages of lags and delays whenever the trade volume goes up.
He stated that one of the quick and possible fixes for the delaying and lagging problem is to clear out browser history and cache before logging into the platforms.
On an international scale, the investors from Europe complained about facing the same problem. However, the reason almost the same as the FTSE 100 index experienced an increase in trades due to a 4.68% increase that the index experienced.
Among all the investors and brokers, the most amount of frustration was expressed by the clients of the UK Branch of Fidelity, AJ Bell YouInvest, and Hargreaves Lansdown. The majority of the investors shared their concerns through the Twitter platform.
Therefore, it is extremely important for the exchanges to upgrade their infrastructure to support the flow of high transaction volumes and high users on the platform.
