markr
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Post by markr on Feb 27, 2019 18:01:40 GMT
They go up & down rather dependant on your chosen timescale; from 950 to 1100 was known as the medieval warm period (where it's believed they were HIGHER than today) & in the 17th century there was significant cooling known as the little ice age. Please just don't believe all this 5 years to save the planet & your children's future scaremongering.
98% of scientists agree partly due to self interest because their jobs & funding is directly or indirectly funded by vested climate change embracing organisations. I can pay 20 others to tell you it's not true but that wouldn't make it right either.
Nope, temperatures in the MWP were nowhere near as high, and the changes were much slower, than post-industrial warming. Even more concerning is 21st century warming is continuing against what should be a falling trend. Climate change is going to have a major impact on human civilisation in the near future, and no amount of conspiracy theories will change that. Don't worry about the scientists, they'll be fine; there'll always be a need for critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning however inconvenient the results. Put your wallet away, too, there are plenty of vested climate change denying organisations funding the 2% of scientists who, due to self interest, persist in their denial despite the mountains of contrary evidence.
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markr
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Post by markr on Feb 27, 2019 16:42:36 GMT
Temperatures *are* actually rising.
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markr
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Post by markr on Feb 27, 2019 16:05:18 GMT
Weather != Climate
However, I also notice the climate change deniers, who were out in full force last February, are now keeping very quiet, so it cuts both ways.
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markr
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Post by markr on Jan 15, 2019 12:51:03 GMT
I don’t drink don’t smoke
What DO you do?
<Insert subtle innuendos here>
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markr
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Post by markr on Nov 7, 2018 12:06:54 GMT
A risky strategy.
"Savvy" investors, such as those likely to use a forum like this, can no longer make the returns of the past because we can't dump our risk on to other investors. I'm sure the majority of retail investors have seen an improvement in their portfolios now that we aren't dumping our risk on them.
FC's business model is changing on both sides. For investors, the product has become much simpler, essentially, deposit your money and we will lend it for you to attempt to achieve a stated target return. No more bidding wars crashing the website, no more robots hoovering up D and E loans creaming off a month's interest and selling at a profit, no more refreshing the loans page constantly to try to beat the robots, no more rants on Trustpilot from people who lost money buying dented E parts from the roboteers. The target rates are conservatively set, so most investors should make or exceed them, and the current 5-7% bottom line target is typical for P2P platforms.
For borrowers, not having to chase headline rates for investors means they can target the prime loans market that P2P traditionally struggles with. The 1.9% rate on the TV adverts are real - I have 1.9% loans in my portfolio - but there's no way they'd have filled loans that low in the old model. This was a constant thorn in FC's side; investors would demand high rates but obsess about bad debt. Being able to allocate investors money as they see fit means they can guarantee to fill them, and improve their loan book bad debt performance.
So, in summary, assuming that huge swathes of investors have or will desert FC is a very forum-centric view.
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markr
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Post by markr on Nov 6, 2018 13:31:33 GMT
'Enlightened' would seem to be that people get to travel only to those destinations the state wants/allows them to. Not for me, thanks. As far as I am aware, none of these schemes have banned anyone from going anywhere, merely influenced their choice of how to get there.
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markr
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Post by markr on Nov 6, 2018 13:10:16 GMT
Really? Don't you say yourself that the cost of motoring has been falling in real terms which if true will make it more rather than less accessible. Yes, really. But for environmental and quality of life reasons, not cost. The cities that are restricting car use are generally doing it though legislation, and by making the alternatives more desirable, rather than by price.
I have no ideological dislike of anything, really. As a scientist and engineer, I have evidence, and the clear evidence is that "business as usual" in many areas of our lives is not sustainable. Transport, and especially road transport, is one area where that un-sustainability is writ large, and which no one seems to want to do anything about.
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markr
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Post by markr on Nov 6, 2018 10:29:22 GMT
The "poor motorist" is a myth; the cost of motoring has been falling in real terms since the 1990s (source: RAC foundation), while costs of all forms of public transport has risen significantly (same source).
The average car driver is about 1.6 times wealthier than the median, and the average train passenger is over 2 times wealthier (source: memory I'm afraid I'm struggling to find a citation). The only form of motorised transport where the average user is poorer than the median is the bus, so if the government really wanted to help the less well off get around, it would increase support for local bus services, but of course it is doing the exact opposite.
The time when it can be assumed that everyone can own a car and drive it wherever and whenever they like are coming to an end. More enlightened countries and cities are already planning and developing for that future - I believe Oslo and Madrid are among the latest of a growing list of cities introducing some form of restrictions on motoring. The UK government, as always, is burying it's head in the sand for fear of offending the sensibilities of the "poor motorist" or annoying their chums in the roadbuilding companies who might stop their "donations" to the party.
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markr
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Post by markr on Oct 27, 2018 16:50:52 GMT
I think part of the problem may be FC's decision to get out of property loans. In the past, late running development loans would in all likelihood have been refinanced on the FC platform, with cashback incentives and/or higher rates if needed to ensure they filled. For quite a few of my late property loans, the comments reveal that delays in obtaining external finance are causing the hold up.
Of course, borrowers struggling to refinance may turn to other P2P platforms, so lenders who abandoned FC previously may end up lending to the same borrowers anyway.
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markr
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Post by markr on Oct 24, 2018 23:11:20 GMT
Is there a way of finding out stats on overall default rates during all loans life spans? in a chart / graph? As it happens, yes there is, it's one of the few statistics FC still publish. On their statistics page, click the "Returns" tab and scroll down to the lifetime default rate graph.
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markr
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Post by markr on Oct 23, 2018 18:51:42 GMT
I have never seen a loan downgraded when it has £1 or so left to pay 1399, 1724, 2978, 4707, 6980 are just the ones in my rogues gallery...
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markr
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Post by markr on Sept 20, 2018 13:43:46 GMT
Let me clarify a bit as well.
Before the change, I reckon that around 80+% of my portfolio was more-or-less risk free(*), because I was actively managing it using the well documented risk-shedding techniques. The remaining part was mainly leftovers from bidding days and loans I'd decided to keep a small lump in.
I suspect that most forum users were using a similar strategy, so on change day nearly everyone's portfolios went from "essentially no risk" to "some risk" instantly regardless of what they'd done in the weeks before to prepare. And this was not because of some sudden change to the loan book, but simply because our ability to offload the risk to others had gone. These defaults were happening all day every day (well, all day every Thursday) before and after the change, it just that before the change we weren't holding them when the music stopped.
My mistake, possibly, was to not predict this and rebalance, so my line is probably steeper than many (although of course my return before defaults will be higher), but everyone in a similar situation will have a upward kink like mine!
(*) I was caught by a handful of very early failures, but they amount to fractions of a percent of my portfolio.
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markr
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Post by markr on Sept 20, 2018 12:18:48 GMT
(I don't have an insight into defaults of loans less than a year old.)
Expand the "My Loan Parts" section, and select the "Loan Parts" tab. From the Status drop-down list select Bad Debt. Then click on the "Loan ID" column header to sort in descending order of ID. The September change occurred around ID 43000, so higher IDs than that are post-September, although for any particular loan you can click on it and look at the first repayment date which is usually 1 month after the day the loan was formed. While on a loan's page, if you look at the "My Orders" tab you can see if and when you bought the loan on the Primary Market. If there's no entry there, you acquired the loan from the Secondary Market, although there's no easy way to tell when except to trawl through your statements looking for the loan part ID (not the loan ID!)
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markr
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Post by markr on Sept 19, 2018 17:26:00 GMT
Like many people here, in the pre-September FC I was applying a number of strategies to reduce the number of defaults that I saw. In my case it was a combination of property sold before the end date and, when property was being phased out, buying mainly C and D loans on the PM and selling them over the first six months or so. I was happy to stuff my portfolio with these riskier loans because I knew I could dump a good proportion of that risk onto someone else. The attached graph shows my bad debt and recoveries over this period. The massive increase in bad debt rate corresponds pretty much exactly with "black box day". However, a key point is that this uptick is nothing to do with the loan book getting worse, which I know because I have not had a single default of a loan formed post-September '17. Some of the defaulted loans were bought by the black box on the SM, but the majority were loans I had bought manually before the September change. In other words, that uptick is simply because I lost the ability to sell on my loan parts; it is just the loss rate my account would have been seeing, and should have been seeing, were I not dumping risk on some other poor sods. So, I suspect others here were in the same boat last September, i.e. having a riskier than average portfolio and suddenly being "responsible" for bearing all of that risk. This gives the appearance of the loan book suddenly taking a turn for the worse, which brings out the conspiracy theorists, but in actual fact the loan book is probably plodding along much as it always was. I hope I have gone some way to fixing this by switching my account to "conservative" for a while to rebalance the risk, but only time will tell.
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markr
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Post by markr on Sept 4, 2018 22:13:26 GMT
I have a new 6 month A+ loan at a rate of 1.9% (so 0.9% to me after fees). But I also have a 60 month A+ with a rate of 9.9% which is higher than the old A+ rates. Presumably, in the first case I'm just one of the mugs that allows them to emblazon "Rates from 1.9%" on their front page, and the second case is to balance it out so my portfolio stays roughly within the advertised returns.
I guess this is one advantage to FC of the black box; in the pre-September model, a 1.9% loan would be unlikely to fly while a 9.9% A+ would have the flipperbots all over it in milliseconds.
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