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back to article Royal Mail FAIL as web brokerage Hargreaves Lansdown struggles with investor demand

Online share brokerage Hargreaves Lansdown is still struggling to cope with the massive spike in Royal Mail share dealing that brought down its trading portal this morning. The company's Oracle-based infrastructure collapsed 45 minutes after trading began at 8am today, Tom McPhail, a spokesman at HL confirmed to El Reg. " …

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  1. Ragarath

    Virtually all of Royal Mail's staff applied to be allocated shares in the company.

    I don't get why all the Press and advisers keep harking on about this. It is free money to the employees. It is not like they have staked their lives on it they had no choice.

    May as well make a bit of cash out of it, it's not like they had to pay for them.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Like BT and British Gas

      The workers get shares and sell them quickly when they realise that to go up in value, they have to do their jobs properly

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      1. AJ MacLeod
        Reply Icon

        Re: Like BT and British Gas

        "The workers get shares and sell them quickly when they realise that to go up in value, they have to do their jobs properly"

        Except that they can't sell them for years yet (not their freely allocated ones, anyway.) Still, facts etc...

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      2. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Like BT and British Gas

        "despite an infrastructure refresh in the summer when brought HL in a load of Oracle Sparc M5-32 servers "equipped with Oracle Solaris","

        Whoever purchased that lot should be fired immediately.

        No need to buy overpriced Sparc boat anchors these days. Wintel or Lintel would have been far more cost effective......

        Not to mention that Solaris has a terrible security record: http://secunia.com/advisories/product/4813/

        "The most severe unpatched Secunia advisory affecting Sun Solaris 10.x, with all vendor patches applied, is rated Highly critical"

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Some consider it ironic that the members of one of the more left wing and militant unions all purchased partial ownership of the company they work for, fulfilling the socialist dream of workers controlling the means of production, only to sell said control within seconds of being allowed to.

      And then still striking over it.

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    3. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Actually....

      ... This is in ADDITION to the free shares. The free shares were given to the employees whether they wanted them or not, whereas the majority applied to get MORE shares ON TOP of what they were given free. And since the government said that those applying for the minimum of £750's worth would get their full allocation, they all got their shares to trade with (or hold on to).

      So perhaps there are some employees who realise that being shareholders in the business they work for may be useful to bollock the management from both sides, once as employees (with strikes & such), and once as shareholders (you're not being responsible, stop the strikes by negotiating properly, blah blah blah).

      Whatever COULD go wrong, right? Right? RIGHT???

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  2. Quentin North
    FAIL

    "loss-making postal service"?

    In your text you state "government prepares to privatise the loss-making postal service. " This is incorrect. According to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24294745 "Ministers are privatising the business when it is making over £400m in profits"

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    1. Ted Treen
      Reply Icon
      Big Brother

      Re: "loss-making postal service"?

      Whatever:- It's still being sold only because of an EU diktat that demands so.

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      1. auburnman
        Reply Icon

        Re: "loss-making postal service"?

        Which diktat is that? I thought it was being sold off because the Tories are sexually aroused by privatisation.

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      2. Tom 38
        Reply Icon

        Re: "loss-making postal service"?

        No, it is being sold because the pension obligations of RM were crippling the company and the exchequer. By using financial jiggery pokery, that cost is taken away from RM so that a profitable company can be created that is not a state subsidised monstrosity. Without this, RM would still be loss making, and not a soul would have considered paying anything for shares in it.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "loss-making postal service"?

          The pension obligations are still held by the tax payer. Some deal for the taxpayer there.

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    2. Triggerfish
      Reply Icon

      Re: "loss-making postal service"?

      Have there not been accusations though that they can claim tax credits for all of the previous years of loss, so effectively not having to pay tax on any profits for several coming years?

      http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/article1323972.ece

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  3. Frankee Llonnygog

    A PR man named McPhail

    They should have asked their IT bod, Jim McApacity-Planning, for a comment

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A PR man named McPhail

      If you want a better broker, The TD Waterhouse / TD Direct Investing sites were fine despite also being a lead for the Royal Mail sell-off....

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  4. Steve the Cynic

    Their systems collapsed on such a piddling amount?

    WTF?

    When one of the large Chinese banks held its IPO in about 2007, they priced the shares at a stunningly low 4 yuan or so so the common man could afford to buy some, and therefore issued a correspondingly large number of shares. They traded briskly on that day, and the end result was that the total volume traded for the day was around 14 billion shares.

    This, of course, demonstrated the presence of 32-bit share volume counters in information and trading systems around the world, like the one I was working on, which suddenly started showing a negative average price once the volume exceeded 2.15 billion shares...

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  5. Dave Ryder

    No better

    Still unable to trade on line, phones not answered. Its not about trading the RM shares, you cant trade anything at all. Everyone is pretty much locked out.

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    1. Nick Kew
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      Re: No better

      I managed to flog mine about 3pm, having tried&failed both online and by 'phone since 8am.

      H-L coped better with the banking crash five years ago, even when the shorting ban and the Lloyds-HBOS news caused a massive spike. That was also more profitable than a derisory 227 RM shares.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Clowns

    I can assure their PR man that the website has been non-functional all day, constantly, since bang on 8am and it's still inaccessible (as are their phone lines).

    Occassionally I can log into my account and try to place an order, just for it to fail. Mostly though it just won't load any pages, or won't let me log in, or dumps me out at a random earlier screen before getting as far as placing an order.

    As I type at 3.50pm the message on their website is:

    "Service message

    Thank you for visiting the Hargreaves Lansdown Online Service.

    Unfortunately this part of the website [the home screen] is temporarily unavailable.

    We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and are working to restore the service as soon as possible.

    To place a deal please call us on 0117 980 9800, your usual internet dealing rates will apply.

    For any other urgent queries, please call our Online Support team on 0117 980 9953.

    Thank you again for visiting."

    Their phone lines have of course been engaged solidly all day long.

    Good job that trading shares isn't time critical or anything. Who could have predicted that a fair proportion of the (probably) few hundred thousand people they'd bought Royal Mail shares on behalf of would want to sell them. Clowns.

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  7. Gert Leboski

    HL

    As a long suffering Bristol City supporter, this utter lack of foresight is no surprise to me.

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  8. Fletchulence

    Buying shares in the Royal Mail?

    I know it's just me, but by my reckoning I was a shareholder - yesterday. Every UK citizen was.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The loss-making Royal Mail postal service

    It's our postal service, we all pay for it through taxes, that way we get the same level of service regardless of geographical location. Now it'll get NHSized, as in costs will increase year-on-year and delivery will split into a very expensive "premium" service and a crappy basic one for the rest of us.

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    1. teebie
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      Re: The loss-making Royal Mail postal service

      Yup, that's the plan. That's what privatisation is for.

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  10. Mark Burton

    on the upside

    Because I couldn't get in and trade my holding is now worth more. Thanks h-l

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