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Post by ablrate on Dec 6, 2016 17:49:19 GMT
And when we go to buy or sell or invest or whatever, sometimes there is a spurious zero in the field already, which seems to be designed to multiply what we enter by ten. Could we have a nice empty field in every case please, Ablrate? lol.... you found us out.... OK will remove if you insist....
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blender
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Post by blender on Dec 6, 2016 17:52:20 GMT
Thanks Ablrate - love the loan numbers, life is already being made easier.
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SteveT
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Post by SteveT on Dec 6, 2016 17:58:48 GMT
A couple of other suggestions to avoid wasted column width / row height and so reduce the need to scroll up and down pages:
1) Change the Category name for "Capital equipment" (which wraps across 2 lines) to "Equipment" (1 line)
2) Change formatting of percentages to avoid trailing zeros after the decimal point (eg. 14.000% becomes 14%, 99.900% becomes 99.9%), which is also a lot easier to read!
3) Lose the needless trailing ".00" from the Loan Size field (eg. £780,000.00 becomes £780,000)
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Post by oldnick on Dec 7, 2016 7:23:50 GMT
Thanks ablrate, some useful improvements now in place. How about condensing the top section of 'Current Investments' so we can see our current investments list rather than the pretty, but redundant, pie chart, and those over sized totals?
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Post by ablrate on Dec 7, 2016 19:03:11 GMT
I have to say that the usability of the Ablrate platform has been much improved recently by the changes made. Goodbye to the Geeks, hello flexibility and responsiveness.
New feature request One small but important improvement would help me and perhaps others. And that would be a figure for my 'total funds' on the dashboard. I would like to see easily how much I have in Ablrate and to watch it tick up, which I know it does. At present to find out my total stake plus earnings I have to add four figures - Available funds, Active bids, Bids on proposed loans, and Funds currently lent. If Ablrate would just add up those four figures please and place the result somewhere on my dashboard I would be really happy (for a while). I assume that unfunded pledges will not be in any of those four figures. If I had losses and recoveries (which are netted of from funds currently lent at present), I would like to have visibility of that also - but I do not plan to have losses. Just for you blender.. done, should be deployed tomorrow so you can be happy (for a while ):
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blender
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Post by blender on Dec 7, 2016 19:53:47 GMT
Wow, I'm honoured. Looks fine to me, though would call it Ablrate total funds and forget the 'on'. Should not include any accrued interest, nor any unfunded pledges. It can cause a bit of a problem because if you put in say £1k and buy something on the SM at par the total funds goes down by the accrued interest bought. Of course Ablrate lenders are bright enough to cope, but there could be an accrued interest figure displayed which would tick up daily to give comfort in the early days of an account. Overall really good improvements to the site are being made cumulatively.
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james
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Post by james on Dec 7, 2016 22:49:04 GMT
Considering What's on the Ablrate secondary market? I've been trying to think of a good way to present the available yields in the secondary market listing. Here's the best I've come up with so far: 1. three columns for offers , "highest yield", "highest yield with at least £100 available", "highest yield with at least £500 available" 2. tool tip to display the first n (10?) entries in offers 3. one column for bids, "highest yield", since this is likely to have lower demand, can increase later if there is demand for more. Can then sort on the offer or bid column for the size of buy that interests you, smaller folk can go for just highest yield column, bigger hitters the at least 500 available column. These don't need to be constantly correct, periodic updates would be fine. But not on a regular ten minute or hourly schedule, somewhat random variation on update calculation being triggered so it can be say anywhere within a minute, ten minute or hour range. This is to prevent fast fingers first competition at a known update time. Displaying last update timestamp would be useful to quickly indicate if there's been any change since last check for a person who's keen. But can anyone come up with something that better answers the question that seems to most interest potential buyers and sellers, the yield, while accommodating the different desired investment sizes and providing some insight into the state of each loan's market? And which will scale as more loans are added?
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blender
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Post by blender on Dec 7, 2016 23:17:48 GMT
Ablrate, while you are looking at the reporting on the dashboard, you could consider changing next instalment date and amount to repayment (or payment for short which is used in the loan details). It seems confusing to use a new undefined word like instalment when payment is generally used for the same thing elsewhere. Of course there are other payments, like instant returns, but they are not scheduled. There may have been a reason why instalment was chosen, but I cannot see it. (This is a small point).
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Post by oldnick on Dec 8, 2016 6:37:09 GMT
While you're looking at 'next instalment date', how about, when we roll over the little calendar symbol next to it, it actually reveals a calendar - with not just our next instalment date but all subsequent dates on each month's flippable page?
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james
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Post by james on Dec 8, 2016 7:27:13 GMT
I keep something similar myself for just the day of the month, interest, capital and loan end date. Lets me see the cash flow picture conveniently for each platform where it matters. If Ablrate wants to get fancy the boxes in the calendar could use different shades of the same colour to indicate the amount relative to other amounts expected.
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SteveT
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Post by SteveT on Dec 8, 2016 8:20:50 GMT
But can anyone come up with something that better answers the question that seems to most interest potential buyers and sellers, the yield, while accommodating the different desired investment sizes and providing some insight into the state of each loan's market? And which will scale as more loans are added? I suggest simply changing the "Best Bid" and Best Offer" columns to show % yield, which is what people are actually interested in, rather than % premium / discount. Not sure there's much point in showing yields for different volumes since even bigger traders will want to take advantage of "best available" price. What would improve market insight enormously is to restrict the setting of premiums/discounts to steps of 0.1% (100%, 100.1%, etc) and then, on the individual loan page, show the aggregate amount available at each price level. Clicking on a price level could expand it to show the individual bids/offers so that lenders can see where they sit in the queue at that price. For example: Offer Price Yield (AER) Offer Size 100.5% 12.25% £340 100.6% 12.17% £1508 > £750 > £258 > £500 100.7% 12.09% £2500 100.8% 12.01% £3560
This would fix the current problem of all the displayed offers being little sums at trivially different discounts; small amounts at the same price would be aggregated together, and sellers would be obliged to reduce their price by at least 0.1% to jump others in the queue (not just 0.001% as now)
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james
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Post by james on Dec 8, 2016 8:50:33 GMT
What would improve market insight enormously is to restrict the setting of premiums/discounts to steps of 0.1% (100%, 100.1%, etc) That would be a pretty backwards move and particularly painful with loans where that would make a substantial difference in the yield. If someone doesn't like a 0.001% difference they can just underbid it by 0.009. Steps that produce a change of at least 0.01% in yield or, better, a penny of interest over the remaining lifetime of the loan would make a bit more sense since that would work for loans at most stages of their life. But I'm happy to see under-bidding of 0.001% of par and don't find it a problem to under-bid that if I want to. I just replaced an offer at .01 difference with one at .001 - from .n90 to .n99. That produced a change in yield of 0.105%, which is not an irrelevant yield difference. Forcing 0.01% markup/down rounding would in that loan be forcing a yield change of that 0.1%, too big a step. on the individual loan page, show the aggregate amount available at each price level. That mostly just makes life tougher for buyers without delivering an advantage. This would fix the current problem of all the displayed offers being little sums at trivially different discounts Just a day or two ago I looked at every bid and offer on the secondary market for every loan when updating the summary of what's on all of those secondary markets. There wasn't anything that looked like a troublesome pattern of tiny differences, though there were some quite small differences, including 0.001% from time to time. The variation in differences shows people taking and acting on different views of what differences they wanted and/or targeting particular yields by tweaking at the 0.001 and/or 0.01% levels or just using round number percentages.
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james
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Post by james on Dec 8, 2016 9:29:11 GMT
So, I just tried some experiments to see the effect on a range of loans that aren't due to end soon. Loan 1: .000 vs .n99 is a yield difference of 0.002% Loan 2: .n99 vs .n90 is a yield difference of 0.105% Loan 3: .n90 vs .n99 is a yield difference of 0.011% Loan 4: .n99 vs .n98 has no yield difference. Loan 5: I played around below the highest yield in this loan ( link) 109.000% yield 8.610% 108.999% yield 8.610% 108.990% yield 8.615% 108.900% yield 8.652% Quite a range of yield differences for the various potential difference levels, from no change at some to overly big 0.105% and 0.37%. But these loans aren't ones where the difference will be at its greatest, just some that I played with to see the effects. Amortising loans show reduced effect compared to non-amortising, for example. Maybe you were focused on looking at the one where there is no yield difference from a .n99 to .n98 difference and over-generalised.
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SteveT
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Post by SteveT on Dec 8, 2016 9:32:45 GMT
And why do we see all this tweaking of prices by microscopic increments to hold place in the queue? Because there is relatively little actual buying going on.
IMO, buyers are put off by the array of different discounts and yields displayed to 3 decimal places, mostly against relatively minor sums. Compare that with the highly successful Funding Circle SM where both premiums and Buyer Rates are limited to 1 decimal place. Even the Funding Secure SM, often criticised for it's clutter and lack of clarity, only works to 2 decimal places.
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james
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Post by james on Dec 8, 2016 9:39:08 GMT
And why do we see all this tweaking of prices by microscopic increments to hold place in the queue? Because there is relatively little actual buying going on. IMO, sellers are put off by the array of different discounts and yields displayed to 3 decimal places, mostly against relatively minor sums. Compare that with the highly successful Funding Circle SM where both premiums and Buyer Rates are limited to 1 decimal place. I'd be put off by that overly big Funding Circle step. There is a fair amount of buying going on to judge by my own selling, but maybe not in the loans you happen to be looking at. Though if it's the one I think it might be I sold £500 or so in the last day or so, so it is moving but maybe another offer replaced the one that sold so it appeared that there was no movement when there really was some. According to the Ablrate front page currently £4,255,671.74 of deals.
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