Australia online brokerage startup Stake, which has set itself up as a Robinhood-like democratizer of global markets and bills itself as “the best place to invest in US shares outside of the US” has warned its clients to expect delays and latency in processing orders at the open of US market trading later today.

The company – which said that it spent the weekend upgrading its technology after experiencing numerous glitches during last week’s GameStop fueled market frenzy – sent a note to clients about what they might expect when markets open Monday (see full text below).

Separately, Stake issued a progress update, stating that it had identified a potential bottleneck related to a high level of logging activity generated by unprecedented activity at market open which occurred last week. It added further caching logic to limit the number of requests it is sending to other entities (e.g. Stake’s US broker-dealer DriveWealth) whose systems are also under extreme strain. Stake also increased additional server and database capacity, to handle more throughput.

A number of online brokers, large and small, experienced strain on their systems during the last week of January, as retail traders swarmed online brokerages (including CFD brokers) looking to cash in on the trading frenzy surrounded heavily shorted US stocks, primarily GameStop ($GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc ($AMC).

The note sent today to clients by Stake reads as follows:

What to Expect at Market Open

We’ve had hundreds of thousands of trades executed through Stake in the past week but some customers have experienced intermittent disruptions. We have worked hard all weekend to resolve this.

We believe we’re in good stead for Monday’s session and beyond, however with record volumes putting strain on the global brokerage infrastructure, expect to see some delays and latency. This will be most pronounced at peak periods and just after market open.

Here’s what you might encounter.

Latency at market open

Millions of orders that were placed over the weekend and prior to market open today begin hitting DriveWealth servers to get executed. These orders are from multiple challenger brokers, all around the world, not just Stake.

With Stake seeing the most customers online at this time, millions upon millions of data calls are being made each millisecond to display dashboard, prices, charts and execute orders. As prices move around the most at open and your account’s up, this adds additional load.

This load begins to put strain on the infrastructure and will slow the responsiveness of the platform.

Order cancellations at market open

With certain stocks like $GME and $AMC, prices are highly volatile. Due to price gap jumps, orders set at certain limits could be out of range when the market opens and may be cancelled. Read more about limit order ranges.

Delayed order confirmations through the session

Trades that get placed will get executed as per your instructions. However, the notification of execution has been slow. This may also mean that some market orders may appear stuck in ‘Pending Orders’.

The execution should be in accordance with your instructions and executed timely, but our US broker-dealer has notified its clients of potential latency in order processing. This is particularly pronounced on a Monday morning as the backlog of weekend orders are included into the mix.

Trading halts

Exchanges can halt trading in certain symbols when volatility is high. $GME for example was halted 23 times during last Thursday’s session. In the case this occurs, orders may be cancelled, rejected or filled on a very delayed basis and/or at a different price than the last-quoted price before the halt.

Change in stock availability

While there are currently no restrictions on any securities, including $GME and $AMC, this could change during the market session. DriveWealth may make a decision to restrict trading on some securities and as they are our US broker-dealer, this will be felt upstream on Stake. We will do our best to notify of this but may not be aware in advance ourselves.