Platform Update - 29 Jan

To our Stake community,

The Stake experience over the past few days has not been up to scratch for you, nor up to the standards we hold ourselves to. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and frustration this has caused.

Stake was founded with the intention to open up access to global markets, no matter who you are or where you live. Over this week, that access was not to the quality it should have been.

Firstly, we want to assure you that your assets are completely safe. The issue has been delays in responsiveness which has meant some customers have been unable to log in, unable to load their dashboard and other data or unable to place trades during market hours.

This problem is stemming from the increased volumes and volatility in the market we’ve seen in recent days.

We anticipate that some of these issues will continue in Friday’s market session and beyond. So our focus is two fold:

1. Expedite the recovery of our platform
2. Help you manage your positions in a volatile market

Expedite the Recovery

We have diagnosed the issue. We are hitting a new high in the amount of pings (requests) to our backend database from extremely heightened traffic, especially at market open. This is causing a bottleneck between customers using the platform and our database.

To resolve this, we need to comb through every line of code in our backend database to find the configuration that is causing this bottleneck and then unblock it. We are confident we’ll resolve this bottleneck within the next few days. We’ll update you frequently on our progress.

Once we do, the platform will be fully equipped to deal with these new levels of traffic and trade activity without the responsiveness issues.

This is how we plan to expedite the recovery.

Manage Your Positions

The issues being faced are with the responsiveness of the platform, not its ability to have trades executed. Those that have managed to place trades have had them executed as per instructions (with some delays in the notification, but not the actual execution). So to help manage your positions, we suggest you take certain measures to ensure you are able to place orders.

For most securities we suggest customers place limit orders ahead of the market opening. This will mean your orders are placed, and will be executed as per the instructions of that limit order. Market orders can be placed, but limit orders will be executed at a known price (or better), as per your instructions. While the trade will be executed, the transaction notification email may be delayed by up to a few hours.

Please note, however, that we’re likely to see extremely high market volatility tonight. In these conditions, it’s possible that limit orders set at high or low prices relative to the market open may not fill, even if the market price briefly reaches the limit price.

Important for extremely volatile individual stocks, including those which have been highly traded this week, it may be very hard to successfully execute a limit order. For your highest chances of a successful trade on these stocks, if you’re comfortable with bid/ask spread and have clarity on current prices, we suggest you use a market order. If you’re comfortable with the potential price variance and risk, you can also use a stop order, which will activate a market order as soon as a set price threshold is met – please note, however, that in times of high volatility rapid price swings mean that stop orders can execute at market prices very different to the stop price set.

For further support on order types and what to expect during this time, head over to our FAQs blog here.

Given the technical issues we’re facing and the current, extremely volatile market conditions, you may find it unsuitable to use Stake to day trade. It pains us to say this as we don’t take an opinion on how people should manage their money, however this is something important to consider.

If you do however try to trade during market hours and are unable to place a trade we suggest waiting up to a minute for the relevant page to load. If on the app this does not work, hard-close and re-open the app.

Orders that do get placed during market hours will be executed, however the transaction notification email may be delayed by up to a few hours. Again, to manage your positions, we suggest you place limit orders before the market opens

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We are acutely aware this is not an ideal situation. You put your trust and funds in Stake and we are deeply disappointed this situation has occurred. There have been suggestions that we are intentionally restricting customers from trading. Some will believe certain things regardless of the facts, but those that know us and have been customers of Stake know just how categorically untrue this is.

Our mission is to provide access to global opportunities and are working our butts off, 24/7, with a focus on expediting the recovery of the platform and helping customers manage their positions, to put us strongly back on this journey.

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and frustration.

Cheers,
The Stake Team