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Post by padney on Oct 19, 2019 15:43:41 GMT
RE: the residual LTV:
Yeah I was wondering that myself. Looking at the assets page, they do seem to be keeping up with what is being sold, and what the remaining value of the securities are. I just hope they are keeping on top of it properly, and they dont run out of assets to cover the growing interest due...
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Post by padney on Jun 15, 2018 6:37:01 GMT
Back in the day of being able to micromanage loans, I was downloading the loanbook daily so my bot could run its code against it to see which of my holdings it would sell. Now we cant do anything but put in money and pray, its no wonder its being downloaded less. Doesn't mean they should stop offering it though, the lack of transparency makes me very nervous.
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Post by padney on May 24, 2018 17:03:55 GMT
I am also getting rather nervous about this...
I am certain that I saw a statement on their website that the items held as security were held in their own secured, insured warehouse. Is this the case, or am I imagining it?
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Post by padney on Aug 21, 2017 7:39:10 GMT
Yup, its now just going to turn a totally opaque put money in, trust us, we will lend it well, honest gov investment. Which is totally fine for many people. But not fine for people who are looking to play the game and see if they can do better.
My girlfriend is going to stop, not because she is a bot user like me, but because she liked to be able to pick individual companies, and avoid any she didn't like based on ethical decisions.
The question for me is: for those who do like the totally open buy/sell lending platform, where do we go now?
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Post by padney on Aug 21, 2017 7:32:46 GMT
Like everyone I assumed something like this was coming. I can totally see why they would do it from their perspective, so long as the available cash doesn't dry up with people going to other platforms.
They said that 73% of new investors use autobid, but are these relatively low capitol investors? I would have thought the people with larger totals are more likely to not be just using autobid. I assume they have thought of this though! They might have also left auto bid on with small values, whilst they manually do large investments, skewing the "80% use autobid" thing. Its up to them though how they run their platform.
Just as I finished optimising my selling bot too! Doh! I might keep a weather eye on the secondary market to see if I get stuck with loan parts as there is a bloat of stuff being sold.
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Post by padney on May 19, 2017 21:34:40 GMT
As to if its worth it, well that is questionable. If you want to learn coding, its a great excuse to do it. If you want to think "well my time costs X, and I want to do X much better than I would have done without it", then well you will need a fair bit invested in FC. Tens of thousands or so.
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Post by padney on May 19, 2017 21:32:27 GMT
Hi Soakaway,
So I am currently re-writing mine in C#, basically it just uses the selenium library for everything, using xpaths on basically everything I need to interact with.
The first step I did was to get the selenium library interacting with all the bits of the website I needed to. I then made a class that handles all that, and then worked out all of the logical steps as to how to go from knowing what loans are available through to bidding.
Suggestions:
Sometimes clicks don't work due to the website being slow/broken. You might need to have more than one go at something until it works.
Especially if you DO have multiple attempts at anything, have a robust way of checking you don't over bid. Check the bid amount field on the bid screen, check available funds, check the numbers change as you would expect
Make your code NOT behave dangerously if any of your data retrieval goes wrong due to website changes. (for example don't look at your bid amount and keep clicking until it goes over your target bid value. What happens if the reference changes and it now turns out what you thought was your bid amount has turned into something like the loan term field?)
And make your code kind on the funding circle website, they are actively looking for bots which are not.
Dont stick your username/password in the source code and carry the source code around in your pocket on a thumbdrive!
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Post by padney on May 10, 2017 17:13:14 GMT
Hello! So I got this same email from funding circle.
I gave them a call to find out what the real issue is. The starting point for all of this was putting the loan requests page within the logged in area, which allows them to very easily see which users are creating what traffic.
The email mentions refreshes of the loan requests page as being the driver, but on the phone, it actually came across that their *main* issue is speed of loan part purchases.
I have a ~40 second refresh rate to look for loans, 6 seconds (10 loads in sixty seconds) seems a little fast to me tbh... I dont buy that many parts (around 3 or so) per loan. (edit oh and 4 seconds between each loan part purchase)
And yes, selenium is great!
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Post by padney on Mar 1, 2017 18:11:21 GMT
Fair enough. What are you going into now?
I have done some analysis on trying to look at historical default rates on the loanbook by industry, loan purpose ect.. and have not come up with anything particularly useful in that regard.
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Post by padney on Mar 1, 2017 8:58:23 GMT
Out of interest, does your code function in a similar way to mine? Is there any obvious facility you think I might be missing?
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Post by padney on Mar 1, 2017 8:57:41 GMT
The comment regarding robustness is fair. I am not too fussed though in this particular case. For that to happen a) the my live bids check on the bid screen would have to fail and b) I would have to be running multiple instances (or close and reopen the program whilst loans matching the criteria are still there). I could always sell them if I had to anyway! I will bear it in mind for other applications though.
I find its fast enough for C and D, it seems to get the majority of E's that the scrape notices, but sometimes the last click of the bid button is too late. (I am normally bidding in the last 70-90% of an E loan by the time I get to it). I bid three times generally, with a 1 second interval between bids. It shows how tight everything is when the maximum time my code can take to finish bidding after a loan appears at the worst possible time is ~45 seconds, and even that isn't always quite fast enough. Simple solution is to check for new loans every 15 seconds, but I can see that starting to annoy FC.
Website changes are an annoyance, but pretty quick to fix. I just start up the program in visual studio and look at the debugging outputs I have put throughout the website interaction bits. Generally its just a case of finding out where it fails, then putting in an updated xpath. I have got that down to a pretty quick process.
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Post by padney on Feb 28, 2017 17:52:40 GMT
So I built a funding circle bot for buying loans. I got fed up with autobid being so terrible! I like to invest in C,D and E loans. Videos make it easier, so here is a link... sorry its not that exciting. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlUgMjZulkIOne question I have for anyone else doing similar... what sort of interval do you recommend grabbing information from funding circle at? I am going with 30 seconds, and I am hoping that doesn't piss them off. It hasn't so far! I have emailed them about this when I had a simpler program. It just sent me an email when there was a C,D or E risk loan available to buy. I told them I was scraping data from their website every 30 seconds and they didn't seem to care. They just said so long as I didn't compromise performance of their site, they were happy. This program is basically my way of trying to have half a chance of getting the higher risk and return D and E loans. Autobid basically fails at that. Personally I think its BS, autobid should trigger instantly when a new loan comes up, and only then the investors with direct access to funding circle should be cleared to get their greasy paws at it.
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