How long does it take to sell now?

FIFO, like ratesetterr, would be obvious and fair, if you delist and relist then you lose your place in queue, like ratesetterr. This would, of course, give a advantage to sell bots, so I could make a case for random.

LIFO, if we really have that, wins no fairness prizes at all. However, like you, I suspect FC haven't a clue, or haven't even realised it is an issue ... Yes they could be manipulating the stats, but I don't think they are that capable ( of conceiving, nor implementing .. Except by accident).

I was informed by an expert long ago on another forum that when the loan parts for sale are displayed for manual purchase the order of display of identical offers was changed each time it was presented. However, that does not seem to be the case with Autobid on the SM, dealing only with par offers and looking for thresholds rather than the best offer, where the empirical evidence suggests that Autobid prefers the freshest meat. But since for most of FC's lifetime any half decent parts at par were snapped up quickly, questions of fairness have not been relevant. Only during the MBR crisis of June 2013 has there been a large queue of unsold loan parts at par, and that did not last long.  It is only during these last few months of shortage of lender cash that fairness has become an issue for Autobid on the SM.

Definitely true, mikeb.

However there seems to be a plethora of (presumably newbie) lenders out there at the moment with an insatiable desire to loan their money to someone - perhaps anyone - at almost any rate.

Even most of my loan parts which I had been offering at a premium for many weeks have been eagerly scooped up, and auctions seem have been driven down to the lowest rates I've seen for many months.

I'm thinking of having a "bidding holiday" until rates pick up again!

I suspect the logic was never intentional. When the code was initially written and the SM was small, it would be more difficult to notice any difference.

I've just offloaded all my longer term loans. I started by listing 33 one evening and 21 of those went quite quickly and the rest sat there for a day, so re listed the remainder and about 5 went within seconds. Repeated that process 3 more times and all have now all gone.

Most at par. I had a couple with a premium which went early on and were obviously manual purchases.

An update on the issue of apparent LIFO priority of SM sales:

After a bit of heckling disturbed the silence of the other place,  FC emitted :

"...we checked in again and have been told that a change was recently made in the code to ensure that autobid always picks up loans parts randomly in all situations.

So it may have been the case that you noticed an anomaly but this shouldn't be the case going forward..."

I can't validate this, since understanding what was happening I managed to get rid off all my junk less desirable loan parts.