This started as a way to eliminate the middleman but that big fat f*** is now the only one benefiting from Lending Club. Social benefit is gone, help for small time borrowers is gone, profit to small lenders taking the biggest risk is gone. Get OUT!! And if you never got in, for heaven's sake don't even think about it.
Are there actually any small investors left here? I just can't wait to be out of this suck hole of an investment. What I've observed and it's gotten worse in the last few months:
I'm not even going to talk about the legality of putting people in a position where they can't actually buy new notes and are forced into this lame secondary market where a return of 4% is a small miracle. Can't really participate and can't leave. WTF and thank St. Peter I don't live in Ohio, where apparently all holders of IRAs are forced to look at their cash build up at 0% with no decent option to either invest or remove it without a fee that eats up whatever little profit they managed to eke out. And what's with the total opacity about this? Temporary. Working on it. No explanation of what the problem is and how they're trying to solve it, which basically is like an "out of order sign" that's got a layer of dust on it: we have no intention of addressing this issue.
While I'm visiting with this particular pos, did most of you get that $25 gift card and an explanation? I have a regular and an ira with LC and I have combed my emails from both. No one said Boo to me, I discovered this lovely surprise fail by trying to use my phone app and finding out it didn't work, and certainly no $25 apology.
Bot activity seems way up. Even a marginally decent note, not to mention some lovely outlier I happen to see like a comet flashing by, stands no chance of being available by the time I can try to buy it, even if I go in blind without opening it first and hope for the best. Oh look, a note at sev ... never mind.
I'm putting notes up for sale and they just disappear into the ozone. My friend looks to see if they're available under her own account with every search criteria imaginable and no, they're just Gone. Sometimes she can see other pieces of the same loan, but not mine. This seems especially prevalent with problem notes. I try to sell something that's 16 days late at a big discount and it just never comes up on the floor at all, I wind up holding it for months until it dies in my hands.
Big is apparently tightening its bot criteria. Even a measly 4% return on a high quality note is often too much to ask, they're all gone. All. Even the ones with hidden issues.
Stupid timing seems to keep some bad notes in my portfolio forever. I've got a sale pending and all of a sudden it's cancelled because some collector has tried to run a bank payment after the client has just said they can't pay. Over and over.
There seems to be no continuity. Some debtors are hounded multiple times a day about a note that's 6 days late and others, it's like 'where the hell did That come from' because I haven't seen word one about it being late until suddenly it's showing up a month later, with basically no collection attempts.
My other beefs that haven't changed over time: Why isn't there an easy way to see the remaining duration of notes in my portfolio without either opening them one at a time or messing around with a Folio hack. Someone else said it, the information that's given is mostly unimportant and useless and what you want to know is buried and needs pliers to get at.
Why is there no ability to archive notes that have been sold years ago. If I use the portfolio sort function, there's then no way to get an overall picture of all the notes I actually own in the present, "all" includes utterly misleading and useless information from notes owned back to 2015. I might, theoretically, want to wax nostalgic about 14,000 notes I'll never need data on again. In the mean time, could you please get them the %^&* out of my way?
Summary: Let's just hit the refrain again: This started as a way to eliminate the middleman but that big fat f*** is now the only one benefiting from Lending Club. Social benefit is gone, profits to small lenders taking the biggest risk is gone. Get OUT!! And if you never got in, for heaven's sake don't even think about it.
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