(Reuters) -Charles Schwab, Vanguard and other online brokerages reported service disruptions on Monday, frustrating investors looking to trade on a day when many dumped anything risky from stocks to crypto on fears of a U.S. recession.
Some users are having problems logging into their accounts, the trading apps confirmed, without elaborating.
Wall Street’s main indexes plunged on Monday as weak economic data, drab second-quarter earnings from technology behemoths and geopolitical tensions revived concerns about a recession and dampened hopes of a soft landing.
The Cboe volatility index, Wall Street’s fear gauge, was at a two-year high after hitting its highest since March 2020 earlier in the session.
Bouts of extreme market volatility can sometimes trigger such technical problems, which also raise questions about the capacity of brokerages to handle high volumes.
Such glitches have often drawn the ire of retail investors, who may be looking to “buy the dip” or unwind their positions.
Several users took to social media platform X on Monday to complain of the disruption, with some promising to seek alternatives.
The Securities and Exchange Commission was tracking the developments, a spokesperson for the regulator told Reuters.
“We are actively monitoring for the orderly functioning of markets,” the spokesperson said.
Fidelity Investments, another popular brokerage, had also faced similar issues earlier in the day. The problem was now resolved, it said in a post on X.
At peak, Schwab was down for nearly 14,500 users while more than 2,800 users reported problems with Vanguard, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
Earlier in the day, Robinhood Markets, the platform of choice for several retail investors, said it had resumed overnight trading after a pause. The company allows users to trade select stocks and exchange-traded funds 24 hours.
(Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru and Douglas Gillison in Washington; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)
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