Online brokerages Robinhood, Charles Schwab and others were hit by outages again as the markets continued to reel and amateur traders on Reddit fueled the rapid rise of GameStop and other stocks, according to reports on Wednesday (Jan. 27).
Troubled video game retailer GameStop saw shares escalate almost 2,000 percent since the start of 2021. The share price moved beyond $350 on Wednesday.
Mobile app disruptions in service, possibly caused by high trading volumes, prompted Schwab’s TD Ameritrade to limit transactions on shares of GameStop, AMC and others, Bloomberg reported. “We made these decisions out of an abundance of caution amid unprecedented market conditions and other factors,” TD Ameritrade spokeswoman Margaret Farrell told the news outlet.
Schwab said clients were experiencing trouble amid “heightened trading across the market,” spokeswoman Mayura Hooper said in an email to Bloomberg.
GameStop shares have been a favorite of members of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets, according to reports, with investors flooding the market and driving up prices. Last week GameStop went up 69 percent, and on Monday (Jan. 25), the company’s trading was stopped nine times, The Verge reported.
The Reddit forum WallStreetBets describes itself as being “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal.” Redditor u/delaneydi was the first to argue that GameStop shares were underpriced by the market, per The Verge. Day traders like the investors on r/WallStreetBets are usually not taken seriously by professional traders.
GameStop’s escalation on Wednesday (Jan. 27) was also thought to have been triggered in part by a Tuesday (Jan. 26) Tweet at end of the day by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
Two Robinhood outages in March happened during a rally that saw stocks soar by more than 4 percent. Robinhood said at the time that the outages were tied to “instability in a part of our infrastructure that allows our systems to communicate with each other.”
A November surge in the markets also led to outages among some online brokers like TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab and Vanguard.
Wayfair has reduced the time needed to curate product listings by 67%, saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved some conversion rates by 2% by deploying Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The online retailer shared these results in a Sunday (Jan. 10) press release emailed to PYMNTS announcing that it is using Google’s Gemini models on Vertex AI to enhance its product catalog and unlock “the next generation of retail experiences.”
“With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to efficiently scale and enrich our product catalogs, enabling us to support a more seamless and engaging shopping experience for our customers,” Wayfair Chief Technology Officer Fiona Tan said in the release.
Gemini on Google Cloud improved Wayfair’s time-to-market by automatically categorizing products across its 30 million product portfolio, delivered cost savings by eliminating the need to manually tag attributes like color and style, and improved conversion rates by increasing the accuracy of product attributes and improving the coverage of attribute tags in the retailer’s catalog, according to the release.
The technology also automatically catches errors in product dimensions and flags inappropriate materials, per the release.
Wayfair is also using Gemini for Google Workspace to boost employees’ productivity, according to the release.
The retailer is using AI features in this suite of productivity apps to draft and respond to emails, summarize and proofread documents, build presentation templates and gain expertise in new areas, per the release.
“By harnessing the power of Gemini and Google Workspace, Wayfair is not only automating complex tasks and boosting employee collaboration, but also creating more personalized and engaging experiences for every shopper,” Matt Renner, president, global revenue at Google Cloud, said in the release.
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has thrust generative AI into the driver’s seat of retail technologies, prompting brands to reassess their strategies, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration, “What Generative AI Has in Store for the Retail Industry.”
The report found that 92% of companies are using AI-driven personalization to drive growth and that 77% of business leaders rank generative AI as the most impactful emerging technology.