P2P Lending / NFT Lending Forum

Seriously.  Has ANYONE found ANY loans to buy in the last 6 feeding times?

Yes indeed.  The last two weeks, my filter just stopped producing loans.  I've bought a few loans during this time only by looking for loans that came close to my filter, and then I could only find maybe 1 every other day.

Obviously something has changed.  Often these things are temporary, but they are puzzling.  You may have noted that the # loans on the web site has gone down steadily over the last two weeks.  You can see this hour by hour!

I called my LC rep on Wednesday and asked her what they were doing.  She said I was not the only person to make this complaint.  Said she believes the issue is that this season there is light borrower demand.  I'm always skeptical, because these reps tend to simply repeat "the party line" on some issue, so I don't feel satisfied by her explanation.  However, it could be correct.

Here's an entirely-made-up-but-plausible explanation:  Suppose a new (but considered important) institutional customer has just arrived, and is trying to deploy $182 Million.  He complains that there isn't enough product, so LC turns the knob, shifting a higher fraction of loan volume to the whole-loan platform, and gives us peanuts for awhile.  If this is did happen, then it would be important that LC receive complaints from the fractional-loan community, so that they can observe pain from starving us. 

Now I don't know whether that happened or not, but I hope it explains my view that it is important that you call LC and tell them when there is a problem.

I missed two yesterday of the last 6 feeding times and got two notes from the other four, both on the most recent feed, both from my "all recent EFG" filter which managed to have 11 in it.  None of my usual filters have been producing anything so I go directly to the all recent one so I can have something to look at.  This time I looked at all the "time submitted" notations on the complete details pages and saw they were all around 6:20 AM to 9:20AM this morning.     

from: Fred93 on November 28, 2014, 01:36:15 PM

Does LC post new listings to the website at times other than the usual 6am/10am/2pm/6pm posting rounds?

FWIW, it has been a slow week on Prosper too.

from: MarinBB on November 28, 2014, 03:04:59 PM

from: Fred93 on November 28, 2014, 01:36:15 PM

from: avid investor on November 28, 2014, 03:42:33 PM

Well, are or are not the 3rd party sites getting new loans at the same time as the manual clickers?  Or has that nothing to do with this discussion?  For awhile the 3rd  sites had every single loan I (a clicker) did.  Lately, they don't.  Also, if I miss the clock by half a second I miss a few loans.  5 sec. for sure makes a world of difference.  Doesn't bother me. Yes, the "is faster better?" topic has been covered.  I agree that it isn't.  All I want is some to look at.  I expect institutions and people with more skills than I to get there first.  With only a little over 400 total loans not spoken for, I've replaced my Get Invested book marker with one at the Patience chapter.  Sorry if this is totally irrelevant.  I'm not convinced zero loans were dropped at any feeding times.

Some numbers re loan arrival rate.

LC says they did $1.1 B of loans in 3rd Quarter.  That's the run rate.
Loans are about $15,000 average size.
--> 73,333 Loans/Quarter
--> 24,444 Loans/Month
--> 815 loans/day

Looking at nickelsteamroller's stats, June '14 (the most recent they list) had
6267 loans to fractional market.
10912 loans to whole market.
10656 other loans.
That's 27835 loans total for the month, which roughly agrees with the above calculation.
It also shows 23% of loan volume going to the fractional marketplace.

Using 815 loans/day and 23%
--> 187 loans/day to the fractional market.
--> 187/4 --> 47 loans/feeding time.

So 47 loans/feeding time is what one would expect, if LC is keeping up the input volume, and if they are continuing to allocate 23% to the fractional market.  These numbers are of course rough, for a variety of reasons.

The kind of simple analysis will be impossible in the future, as LC is venturing into new kinds of loans, and reporting much less data, making everything less transparent.

The 2pm round today (6mins ago) yielded 82 new listings for me. Around 20 of them filled inside of 30sec. Avid investor, how often do you query for new listings? I've noticed that a large portion of newly posted listings are filled within a minute of becoming available.

from: Lovinglifestyle on November 28, 2014, 04:15:12 PM

The holidays were exceedingly light last year, too. I paid careful attention due to my deploying capital for the bank. I managed to pick up 3 Es for myself today, which was good. My last logs show 112 new loans on 2pm load, 70 of which were whole. Nothing I wanted.

from: MarinBB on November 28, 2014, 05:08:33 PM

from: Fred93 on November 28, 2014, 05:38:52 PM

Ok, so here's what may be happening, as I see it:

1) Loans are apparently being dropped at all hours.  We had a LC loan a year back for our business, and after the loan was accepted the system told us that our loan would be "listed at 3 AM tomorrow".  Always thought that was strange given the 9, 1, 5, and 9 drop times.

2) LC's system clock may be out of sync with ours.  My process always started at 8:59, 12:59, 4: 59, and 8:59 in order to avoid that, but if LC's clock is set 2 minutes faster (dropping at 8:58) than our server's, a minimal drop of 40 new notes could be all gone by the time my process starts a minute later.  I trapped this case (for now) by backing up my cron jobs another 2 minutes earlier.

This sucks either way, really.  On one hand, if in fact they are dropping their few loans at all hours, and you wait for the feeding times, you lose out.  On the other hand, if they are still dropping the lion's share (currently a small one) at the prescribed times, and loan volume increases after the holidays, I would hate to have changed to a continuous 24x7 process and fund a bunch of lower return notes all day long just to miss out on the higher return loans that may be in the batches at the prescribed times because the available cash has been exhausted already.  That may be the only way to go to stay fully invested though.

Quote"> from: avid investor on November 28, 2014, 09:10:34 PM

Thanks Fred.  I assume by "you might want to add 10PM and 2AM to your list of times" that you are talking Eastern time?

from: avid investor on November 28, 2014, 10:04:20 PM

Got it.

AnilG posted data awhile back, from which I generated this plot.  He captured # new loans every minute from 2/1/2014 thru 4/26/2014 and posted a spreadsheet, and I summed all the days to produce this plot showing what time-of-day loans drop.  This is the source of my understanding of LC's loan drop behavior.

Well there certainly are a lot of dots at "non-drop" times, as we both suspected.  While I may not (yet) fund notes 24x7, I will likely pull my own data continuously for similar analysis.  Thanks Fred.

I'm not a programmer, but if I was I'd set up a 24/7 process and have a hurdle rate expected return.  And I'd invest anything over that hurdle rate, that can be adjusted based on LC rates and how they move.  I find notes at all hours of the day when I do it manually.

from: Fred93 on November 28, 2014, 10:08:50 PM

from: Fred93 on November 28, 2014, 10:33:24 PM

Yes, useful info but the 2 AM drop for the wholesale leftovers only found 12 new notes.  (Retail inventory went from 453 to 465 at 2:00:30 Pacific time.)  None that my filter wanted.  The 6:00 AM drop saw 37 new loans (inventory increased from 460 to 497).   Tried to get one but it was sold out.  There really is nothing much these days.

from: Lovinglifestyle on November 29, 2014, 09:31:17 AM

from: rawraw on November 29, 2014, 08:44:41 AM

Quote"> from: Fred on November 29, 2014, 01:19:55 PM

I've noticed a distinct lack of inventory lately as well. I'm not a programmer and usually pick notes manually. I log on at random times, whenever I am at my computer at home and have some time. There has been nothing for about 10 days of so now. I also switched on automatic investing and even that has gotten me nothing for the past 5 days or so.

Quote"> from: SeanG on November 29, 2014, 07:10:35 PM

It happens to Prosper as well.  Not only are there fewer loans for both platforms but also the quality of the higher risk loans has deteriorated--especially for Prosper.  It is common to see loan listings with 2 public records and 40-50% debt-to-income ratios on Prosper. 

It's probably seasonal, but it is also likely that lending growth has reached a plateau for now.  My returns for the two platforms have also been declining, with my LC account doing better than my Prosper account, 12%+ v. 10%+.  I am still doing this manually, but at some point, it will no longer be worth the time and effort, especially with some of my best stock funds cranking out 12% on average for the past 10 years.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-01/loans-made-in-blink-as-banks-funds-vie-for-lendingclub-clients.html


This might explain part of the problem and the shortage

Tha bank buys most likely whole loans only.

There has been a meaningful decline in total loan volume available (50-100 per feeding now vs normal amounts of 200-400) and the amount of decent loans available as well.

The likely explanation is a combination of seasonal doldrums, as well as LC focusing heavily on IPO and providing a pop after by artficially restricting volume before.

Someone was hungry.

from: Half Right on December 01, 2014, 10:52:50 AM

Peercube has new loan availability charts.  Cool.  Shows how the new loans have really gone down in the past few weeks.  (Consistent with LC folks statements about seasonal slowness.)

https://www.peercube.com/histperf/available_loans/lc

from: Fred93 on December 02, 2014, 01:53:03 AM

It looks like LC made a change to the API. For the two posting rounds so far today, the API reflected the new batch of listings within 1 second of the expected posting time. The listings initially showed up with $0 funded so far.

If this persists change, it will have closed the gap between the API and the website.

The loan situation has gotten demonstrably better last couple of days, so good to see they are stepping up on getting the technology to work.

from: Half Right on December 01, 2014, 10:52:50 AM

from: brycemason on December 04, 2014, 12:02:49 AM

from: Half Right on December 01, 2014, 10:52:50 AM

from: brycemason on December 04, 2014, 12:02:49 AM