Lending seems to have slowed on Core products

Hi aju,

I can't comment on core as all of my Zopa investments are in plus, and I certainly don't monitor Zopa to the same degree that you do, but I have noticed that my "matching" funds have grown recently. They are currently at about 4 day's worth of repayments, in stead of the more usual 2 days. I had assumed that this was most likely due to a rise in the proportion of investors to borrowers.

I can't see that this would be anything to be concerned about.

The weekly update pages used to give some of this and it was useful to see the splits, it also used to show the monthly total lending amount. The only way to see that is to download the Public file and then use a spreadsheet to see what has been lent out. 

There are places this info is available but the main one, P2P Banking, but at the moment that does not cover October and also its translated into Euro's as well.

How long have you had all your loans in Plus? - my experience so far has been one of Plus can be a little bit scary with defaults in the 6-18 month Zone - that was the old theory but I'm not sure it follows that anymore. Mind you I get some serious numbers of defaults in some months as shown elsewhere in this forum but nothing like as bad a some people who are more in Plus than me. I am quite cautious in untested waters and I am in this for the lonhaul so I've never taken any profit from Zopa just relent all - compounding is King!.

Plus had been generally expected to give worse defaults, some better than others - so I generally favour  a percentage of both types. I had been using 10% for Plus but recently have been expanding that out to 20%. ime will tell.

Over the last month I have been helping Mrs Aju manually lend out her transferred in ISA so its been a bit more close quarters than the norm. I would usually only do consolidations of data when the month cycle is finished and I have fixed previous months statements data.

I wouldn't say I was concerned about the lending rates but if it were to slow down enough for me to have >£1999 in the queues then that would be an issue with my current strategy of keeping diversification of loans to the best I can and way better than Zopa's default 1% - I prefer £10 loans rather than the larger sizes. That said I've been trying this for nearly a year or so and my XIRR rates are diminishing slightly I think. We have been lending quite a bit and that sometimes skews XIRR on the odd occasions when too many - and + items appear (Excel 2007 does have a few bugs I know as well and I have hit them before).

Gloating is not my aim but I'm happy to oblige when the time comes   it may make me feel better when the time comes ...

At least you are lending after August/September 2017 which Zopa later made an adjustment in the D/E markets due to miscalculations of expected defaults. Search "Zopa warns over defaults as investor returns decline" in google and select the times article - using this search method should usually bypasses the Times Paywall. Also Zopa comments in this ft article indicate they changed its blend of D/E loans from 30% to 15% after the unexpected increase in defaults from that time.

Whilst you were probably not affected by that correction you may find that you can still pick up loans from that lend period that may fail in your book rather than the loanbook of the person who originally borrowed and then sold before it may default. That said it may well be that Zopa will uprate your interest take on purchasing any of these to compensate at the expense of the seller. also as Zopa has changed the blend it should be mitigated anyway.

Sorry if that sounds complicated but essentially Zopa made a gaff and changed their blend strategy for future lending. I think the new blend started to land around Feb time this year so generally you would be less affected.

The Core product works for me as my strategy is slightly different to many who go for higher returns rates, perhaps not aware of the risks involved. Being retired with sums of money that were in Banks getting fairly decent rates (Current accounts) then moving to Zopa was to maintain rates that can protect my funds from the dreaded inflation tax and a little bit on the top to make it worthwhile.
Having also been in P2P for since almost the start of Zopa i've gradually increased my lending as I became more comfortable, relatively speaking of course. That early adopter does help and shows for me as tax payer, Mrs Aju is not paying tax and does not have that fee uplift. (This is where a little foresight might have worked should have signed her up when I did but times were tougher in those days and we were both still toiling for a living so only had spare cash for something that was basically an empirical experiment for us).

Oh well that's my view of things so I don't mean to gloat rather show how it has been for some of us invested in the Zopa Plus world.

As I reported elsewhere recently here, despite having pretty good XIRR rates some months can be quite scary, Mrs Aju's worst month, Jun 2018, where defaults wiped out 60% of that months interest was a bit of a concern when taken out of context. 

To be fair, even with Zopa Core, it beats FTSE 100 & 250 Index 1 yr performance today.

Well, yesterday was another day where the repayments were greater than new matched loans in our accounts.
Unmatched money is now around 1.7% of total.
I suspect that this week’s email will show queuing and matching times going outwards. I think it’ll possibly be 0 or 1 for queuing time and above 8 for matching.
My best estimates of returns over all our accounts is around 3.4% when Zopa suggest 4.8%.
I am currently considering whether to move money away from Zopa to RateSetter where currently 5% and above is easily achievable in the 1 year product.