sl125
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Post by sl125 on Mar 27, 2017 18:25:16 GMT
isecguy
I have to say that the idea of an information security analysis being conducted through an anonymous blog and tweets fills me with alarm. And reading the responses from the various platform spokespeople (all of whom transparently declare their credentials) it appears they are equally concerned at receiving anonymous correspondence asking for detailed information about their approaches to security.
Put the ball on the other foot: if you were the CISO for an organisation, how would you respond to such an email from an anonymous source, particularly when there are so many such emails arriving in your inbox - some of which are genuine, most of which are deliberate attempts at phishing / fishing for information.
On your blog you state (by way of justifying treating their lack of engagement with you as a negative) "if a company is implementing their security correctly and taking it seriously, they should have no issues answering the kind of questions I asked. Inability to answer such basic questions demonstrates paranoia and a lack of understanding of basic security fundamentals". Not to beat about the bush on this, but a good demonstration of basic security fundamentals would usually entail engaging in such discussions only with people who have gained your trust in such matters in the first place. It is hardly surprising that most platforms did not respond to you. I would be more worried about those platforms that immediately told told you where the sweeties were hidden.
"Come come, Mr Total Stranger, I trust you so much I'm going to show you where I keep my keys"...
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sl125
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General P2x Discussion
Bot crime!
Mar 13, 2017 8:00:19 GMT
bg likes this
Post by sl125 on Mar 13, 2017 8:00:19 GMT
This is vastly different to the more general bot scenarios, eg where people write scripts to automate their bidding on a marketplace. I'm not sure that it IS "vastly different". In both cases the motive is to acquire a scarce commodity for personal financial gain. Acquiring a scarce commodity for personal financial gain: that description could be applied to most of the IT in place in most financial services organisations. The difference between that and ticket touts is that the touts are using bots to corner the market. It is that monopolistic aspect that leads it to the wrong side of the morality argument. Using bots to automate manual trading on a P2p site is way down the scale.
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Mar 12, 2017 12:08:59 GMT
As far as I understand it, the proposed law is not going to ban bots (how could they?). DCMS is trying to resolve the problem of ticket touts using bots to buy up concert (etc) tickets which they then resell at vastly inflated prices. eg. the situation where Harry Potter / Adele tickets, etc, go on the market on resale sites at tens of thousands of pounds in spite of the efforts of the concert promoters to enforce terms and conditions around reselling.
This is vastly different to the more general bot scenarios, eg where people write scripts to automate their bidding on a marketplace.
Bots are used in so many parts of life, whether it is automated trading systems in financial services (would you seek to ban day trading systems, for example, where the game of marginal gains means that servers are being located as close as possible to the trading market gateways?), or the chatbots that "pretend" to be your online customer services agent whenever you interact with an e-commerce site.
Note that the proposed legislation is being brought in by DCMS (ie. the govt body that deals with the arts and entertainment industry) not by BEIS, FCA or any other the other bodies that would traditionally be interested in legislation covering e-commerce, finance and technology more generally.
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sl125
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Funding Circle (FC)
E-Alert!
Feb 26, 2017 15:48:15 GMT
Post by sl125 on Feb 26, 2017 15:48:15 GMT
Well, 31602 is a D not an E. But the clue to its prevalent discounting could be that the loan is for £159,000 spread across more than 4000 loan parts. I.e. It's probably already spread across many autobidders, so there will be no more autobidders left with funds to pick them up automatically.... instead being picked up slowly by manual bidders.
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Feb 14, 2017 7:44:23 GMT
If you're thinking of paying an IT bod to do it for you, it won't be worth it. Given that you're looking at £100 plus per hour just for design and build, what will you do for maintenance? I.e. Every time FC changes some small part of their website, or. Every time you want your algorithm tweaked.
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Feb 9, 2017 22:32:10 GMT
Ah, good point. So they are showing as paid up, but the payment was a few days late.
I'm not sure why a payment being 3 working days late is considered such a problem, though, that an investor would choose to wind down their investment on that basis.
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Feb 9, 2017 18:06:36 GMT
Encryption sounds simple. If you are one person it is as simple as it sounds. If you are a company it is not. It's easy to say but hard to do. No, not that hard. I was involved in several projects along these lines nearly a decade ago, and there were several options for business-wide manageable encryption even then. If it's "not that hard", then why do so many data breaches occur, and why are such breaches becoming more common? Maybe the options you had a decade ago are no longer relevant today. Increasingly, it is getting much harder to implement robust enterprise security, simply because there are now so many types of threats and attack vectors, especially as more services are provided in the cloud. The NCSC has an interesting set of guides: www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/implementing-cloud-security-principles
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Feb 9, 2017 17:41:39 GMT
If there is one factor that stands out as a reason to continue to sell & reduce, it is loans that default within the first few months. We can all accept genuine business failures, but not this. The borrowers must consider FC to be an easy touch. I guess its called 'debt consolidation'. Today we have 27999 *** Project Services (risk band D), a building company with a nice slick website, but facing 'liquidation' after just two repayments. Feel free to list your favourite rip-off loans here. Technically, it is downgraded, not defaulted. Downgrades do not necessarily lead to defaults.
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Feb 9, 2017 17:39:47 GMT
27521 27981 29700 29368 29473 30570 Interesting.. I did a quick check on the 3 of of those that I've had holdings in: 30570: paid on 3rd Feb, not downgraded. 29368: paid on 2nd Feb, not downgraded. 27521: although downgraded in December, it has made all its payments, last one was 27th Jan
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Feb 6, 2017 20:04:12 GMT
Loan numbers for those?
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Feb 2, 2017 7:58:25 GMT
True, Mr T, but those could only really be taken if you were lucky enough to grab them early enough and the borrower closed the auction early. When I look back at those times, there was no real opportunity to do ones own due diligence ... I simply blatted a spread of bids at 15,14,13 and 12%, and "some" would strike lucky. I could then sell on as necessary... To achieve an overall rate that exceeded the average so comfortably would have involved a degree of flipping, which I personally have no problem with, but I could swear Mr Hor was somewhat against (like so many other things)
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Feb 1, 2017 21:59:43 GMT
Blimey, where to begin, hor?
your figures and your claims do not add up.
1. Firstly, to claim you are achieving 12% and higher returns with lower risk is completely baloney, as it would suggest you have found the investment equivalent of the holy grail or perpetual motion machine. I assume you are familiar with basic concepts such as risk/return trade off? To suggest you can achieve orders of magnitude returns higher than risk free rates and somehow reduce your risk is simply delusional.
2. You claim your fc net returns are 9.3% aer, yet just over a week ago you said "...total default which is 31.45% of my total earnings. " ... Hmmm.... that would imply a return before bad debt of either 12.5% (if you're expressing your defaults as a percentage of your net earnings) or 14% if expressed as a percentage of gross. Which further implies you were simply concentrating on D and E loans (since until recently only D and E loans would achieve such returns)
3. But even then, that suggests your bad debt rate is about 3-4% of capital invested... so despite your "careful" due diligence you achieved the same level of bad debts as just randomly diversifying across FC's portfolio... why did you bother with all that effort?
4. But despite all that, you claim to be highly disappointed with a net return of 9.3% ..... even though FC clearly state that average net returns will be around 7%. And even where FC clearly show the spread of returns between their 5th percentile and 95th percentile ((about 6% and 8% respectively). Did you not understand the returns on offer at fc when you started?
in short, you appear to be making up these claims
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Jan 19, 2017 19:04:36 GMT
In answer to the original question: I am very happy.....
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sl125
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Post by sl125 on Jan 19, 2017 19:03:00 GMT
.... And this on a total default which is 31.45% of my total earnings. ... And this all with careful hand-picking of loans one by one and never using autobid.... So, what you're saying is that your careful handpicking after lots of due diligence on your part resulted in returns that were far worse than if you just blindly accepted the auto bid loans? Kinda says something about your own skills (or lack of). just checking my own stats... total capital invested: £160,000. total earnings after fees and bad debt: £50,000. Total bad debt: £1,700. Ratio of bad debt to earnings is therefore just 3.4% All I can conclude is that you are either staggeringly unlucky, or your negative demeanour has engendered some reverse Midas effect on your loans :-) ....
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sl125
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Funding Circle (FC)
E-Alert!
Nov 18, 2016 16:02:09 GMT
Post by sl125 on Nov 18, 2016 16:02:09 GMT
That was rather frustrating to say the least... every time I refreshed the page I could see that some people were successfully managing to bid, but I was getting a blank value for the rate, so it wouldn't let me bid. Tried on Firefox, IE and Chrome and found the same problem. Hey ho!
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