Newbie ratesetter lender just wondering

propman, I've found it now with your very kind assistance. Lets hope I can find something useful in it.

Many Thanks, 

aju

Glad it helped & there's also Financialthing.com as another good P2P blog with a RS review as well.And hopefully you've got your 6%+ rate now 

Rather annoyed. Spotted £1.1m as Borrower Offers on the 1 yr market that would have required rates >6% to match, rushed to put money on the market. This has now disappeared with rates peaking at 5.2%. Checking the weekly total this has increased significantly suggesting that the £1.1m was matched. Don't think the other markets moved much so I can only conclude that the borrowing had already been matched before I saw it with the lender offers removed but not the borrower offer and sio the data was misleading.

- PM  

I agree, but I would expect that the data is consistent. £1m is a huge amount on the 1 year market, extremely unlikely that this was absorbed by new money in the hour or so between me looking at the data. Yes putting money on at higher rates risks other lenders undercutting me and might happen if the loan left unfilled for many hours, I fully expect that and said above that you should assume some will be matched by other money.

A borrower might have rejected the rate available, but seeing the increase in amount lent in the week, this doesn't appear to have been the case. 

I too noticed some increases yesterday and this morning to no avail though so I reduced my high £10 testers down to 6.0 from 6.4 the other day when things seemed to be improving. I keep a watchful eye in the left side of my screen, I reload the 5yr Mkt rate (id#4) and the Market Rate screen every minute and keep an eye on the flows - there are times when nothing happens then a burst of activity. There was a point this morning where the numbers all of a sudden crept up but then dropped back again - I think it was this morning.

My £40 in £10 blocks is now watching 6.0, 6.1, 6.2 & 6.3. I'm not sure I am achieving much at the moment but I am getting used to the MR activities if not fully understanding the twists and turns it seems to follow.

One question I did have was on any given day when is the critical point that lending may actually pickup my stabs, bearing in mind there are a lot of factors moving things up and down?.

My instinct is that whilst we are all trying to better our returns by trying to game it and there will, as you say, perhaps be some players adding money in large amounts but surely these will be a very small proportion of people gaming things in this way.

In Zopa its relatively clear that there are lending cycles some we can see some we can't. In a lot of cases I am lending on Zopa - in ten pound blocks I'll admit - but it seems that loans can pickup at any times of the day, probably relative to where they are located in each of the queues and when their turn arrives in the queue.

Loans can be picked up, I think its 24 hourly, in zopa. does RS follow similar 24hr cycle of loans pickup?.

Its true i will not be able to sell but as i'm using it to get a handle on getting better rates for lending potentially much larger amounts later then its an acceptable issue. These £10 punts are not really about returns or resale but rather to try and see how RS is working at the rate punting end. At the moment there have been no touches anyway.

We've recently had over £300 crystallized on zopa with their recent default sell offs so locking in £40 is not an issue for us. Mind you probably not best to tell Mrs aju as she would see 40 quid as another shopping opportunity.

One final point is that I've never actually sold a loan from a P2P lender since starting in 2006 but there will come a time when I need to remove funds. I probably wouldn't sell out rather i'd wind down at least with RS I can actually relend capital and withdraw returns. Can't do that yet on Zopa.