Tal**** strikes again

I've been on the wrong side of these a few times - perhaps it's lucky that I was busy today* or I might have been there too. Is it bad to sometimes wish that certain loans go wonky very early on? I feel bad saying it but perhaps somebody needs a short, sharp (40k) shock to play the game fairly.



*spent most of the afternoon on the phone to solicitors so I wasn't earning, although they were no doubt! - that's put me in a bad mood that hopefully Lee Evans at Sheffield Arena can get me out of tonight. At least I won't need a Northern-speak translator to understand him  

If it is a denial of service attack, what’s the answer?

Is this a matter that can be raised with the regulator and if so, could it be instigated by members of this forum working together?

I too lost out on that auction, and had a look at the bids afterwards.  The question the struck me was : why in chunks of £960?  Not exactly an aftermarket-friendly unit size; but if the objective was to put in £40K or so at the last minute, wouldn't it be easier to use the max £2K bid size?

Saw him in Nottingham last Sunday. Your sides will be thoroughly split.

There are a fair number of wealthy people on FC.  Mostly they play nicely, bidding early and over a range of rates.  They provide a useful function for me, in that if they are happy to commit £10K to a company then I'm happy to lend my little £100.   Occasionally you see them popping in a final £1-2K at the end of an auction but generally speaking they are no danger to us smaller bidders or to FC as a whole.   These wealthy people also have first choice at cherry picking whole loans if they wish and I've no problem with that.

The problem with bidders like Tal**** is that they wait till the last few minutes to bid and overload the system with a large number of high value bids.  This ruins the bidding process for everyone else and reflects badly on FC as well.

The answer to this denial of service can only be fixed by Funding Circle.   The simplest way would be to lock your bid button until all the people you have out bid have had their money returned.  So if I bid £20 my button would be active again almost instantly but £1000 would take somewhat longer.   This will slow down the bidding process a bit but would make the system much more responsive to those who have been out bid.

As a recently retired programmer (on SQL Server and C# based websites) I'm well aware of the complexity of the code behind FC and marvel at what has actually been achieved.  However, it needs to be better!

John

I've also suggested both those ... one click per bid is so 19th century. Usual deafening silence.

However they wouldn't fix the 'release of funds' lockups, since a 20*100 bid will cause as much money thrashing as one 2k bid would. The sensible approach is to not go debiting anyone's accounts until auction close .. After all, I don't see punters having to deposit, and get repaid, and redeposit, and so on and so forth when they are buying a van Gogh at Christies... You settle up at the end, or get lynched.

That would also reduce the amount of garbage entries and erasures in the transaction reports.

IMHO if anything is a "denial of service attack" it is the people/bots making thousands of tiny bids per auction.

There is no denial of service for the vast majority of bidders, who don't play these last-minute games of brinkmanship in an effort to squeeze the last possible 0.1% out of each and every borrower.

In effect, all FC auctions have a "blind bidding" phase in the last few seconds, when any final bids made will not be able to take other bidders actions into account.

ISTM the best fix would be to make the "blind bidding" phase explicitly defined, rather than as a side-effect of system performance and level of bidding activity (currently it can effectively be less than 10 seconds on some auctions, but perhaps over a minute on others).

For example, a "blind bidding" phase explicitly defined to be for the final 10 minutes of the auction would result in no bids made during those last 10 minutes being revealed to any other bidders until the auction was over. Any bidder who wished to commit funds during the final 10 minutes, as well as any bidder outbid during those 10 minutes, would have their funds held until just after the auction, and all would find out the result of their bids only afterwards.

It would perhaps act to discourage the dumb robots (and some humans manually following a dumb robot strategy) that seek to achieve a rate 0.1% below the top by repeatedly rebidding at each possible rate all the way down to wherever the auction ends up, and instead encourage more bidding at an "honest" best and final rate.