macq
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Post by macq on Jul 12, 2018 14:16:52 GMT
I am slightly more worried by the fact that over the last few months using auto reinvest my number of loans has only increased by a couple which would suggest a slowing of loan flow maybe. My number of loans has been slowly increasing over several months, perhaps as a result of drip feeding my account a little every week. I've not noticed any dip in loan flow. My bigger concern is the geographical concentration of loans in the south east, specially with prices there currently in decline. Recently OC have gone some way to widening their geographical spread but there is still room for improvement IMO Thanks - it could be i need to keep a check more on how many loans & if there is swapping out but with the number remaining the same as i have been around 230 for a while even with interest and most months even capital going back in. Take your point about regions but guess that is the case with most property products even IT's etc as that is where the concentration of business is. While it is worrying to see 5% or 10% of a fund unavailable(but that has changed back before) as the product is marketed as non instant access plus the usual P2P risk then hopefully it pans out.There's always the option of a sideways move to Oct. cash paying 1.8% among others.As for another point my wife is in LB and not sure if she has not looked deep enough but she can't see loan info i.e late etc given so tends not to worry - so could it be a case of too much info?
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littleoldlady
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Post by littleoldlady on Jul 12, 2018 14:40:29 GMT
Where did you go to, which you thought had a better risk/return ratio? I need a couple of accounts that provide easy access to money. At the same time as I had OC I had Assetz quick access account 4.1% with PF and Growth St 5.3% access up to 30 days with PF. I still use these accounts but like Growth St best, if they have defaults you dont see them and after 18 months have not lost anything Ironically my funds in OC largely came from QAA and GS! We each have to make our own judgement. If there was a single investment which was superior to all others it would soon be the only one. Pluses and minuses.
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dandy
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Post by dandy on Jul 13, 2018 9:24:52 GMT
5% skin in game from major institutional funder or discretionary PF of variable (even unknown size)? Discuss. There is comfort in the size of OC but not sure how connected each part is in a problem i.e Octopus choice & cash have their own Octopus Labs part of the company.My brain says skin in the game is better then a PF which may or may not be there but i would quite like a mix of skin in the game but 10% would be better then 5% & add the LW shield idea (for more comfort if anybody from OC is reading  ) If I had the choice of (a genuine) 5% (first loss) skin in game or 2% PF I would opt for the 5% skin all day long. LY/AC PFs are prime examples of why they should not be relied on. It is not just a question of them going to 0, it is a question of claims mounting that "could potentially" absorb the entire PF. What then? Who gets what? I think that PFs are just a mess in the making and used to hide the true risk.
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Post by octopusjoe on Jul 13, 2018 13:08:34 GMT
Almost 2 years investing here and late payments, over-term and in collection loans are now running at over 185% of interest earned during that period. The same problem of Octopus Choice over allocating funds into single loans remains unresolved. Interest rates have dropped and OC are now resorting to lending at 4.99% to the borrower, 4% to the lender at 72% LTV in the over inflated London market. A lot of concerns were raised about this and a lot of investors abandoned ship and left OC. I thought I would stick it out another year and see but my troubled loans have continued to increase month after month. I just do not see any positive signs at OC. I have a similar level of investment as I do at other p2p companies but the amount of troubled loans just seems to be far higher here. Are others experiencing the same or is there anyone with good performance here? I would really like to here your comments and performance figures. tagged octopusjoe
Firstly, I don't know if you've seen it, but we recently launched our new Statistics page, which we're excited to share with you all. It should hopefully give you an even clearer picture of our performance and loanbook, and I'd encourage everyone to take a look (at the moment, you'll have to be logged out to be able to view it).
While this probably won't provide much comfort, I want to stress that having a portfolio with 88% available to withdraw is above average – currently, 36% of our investors have loans that are on hold in their portfolios. Of these investors, 22% have more than 5% on hold (or 8% of our total investor base). And I'd emphasise that we haven't had any capital or interest losses, and our loan portfolio continues to diversify further, in particular in terms of geography.
Then it's a matter of how long it takes for the loans to get back on track. In our case, to date, 92.1% of loans on hold have got back on track within three months. Although, you probably don't need me to tell you, that past performance is no guarantee of future results.
If you haven't seen it, I recommend checking out this article (don't need to teach you guys how to suck eggs, but I know certain investors have found it useful in understanding why we've seen more loans placed on hold).
Also, on your other point, we do have some loans on the platform now at 4.99%, however we haven't resorted to do anything. Instead, it reflects a move into an arguably more 'vanilla' and liquid 'super-prime' market, which we would say lowers the risk profile of the lending.
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Post by octopusjoe on Jul 13, 2018 13:14:20 GMT
5% skin in game from major institutional funder or discretionary PF of variable (even unknown size)? Discuss. And, on the provision fund point – it's been an interesting discussion. You probably won't be surprised to hear that, at Octopus, we believe having skin in the game alongside our investors is important to align our interests with those of our investors. And in many cases this will represent a higher proportion of the loanbook than other provision funds, too.
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liso
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Post by liso on Jul 13, 2018 13:47:37 GMT
Thank you octopusjoe for the pointer to your new statistics page. The information in it is interesting, useful, and some of it reassuring. However, I'm dismayed to find that the geographical concentration of loans, which has always concerned me, is even worse than I thought! I take the point that you have diversified recently but frankly, not nearly enough IMO. Much more please  |
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littleoldlady
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Post by littleoldlady on Jul 13, 2018 14:02:15 GMT
One improvement I would like to see is some automatic rebalancing of portfolios so that no individual loan is too high a proportion of each portfolio. This is tricky, but other platforms have managed it.
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greatmarko
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Post by greatmarko on Jul 13, 2018 15:15:46 GMT
One improvement I would like to see is some automatic rebalancing of portfolios so that no individual loan is too high a proportion of each portfolio. ^ THIS!!! I've been "drip feeding" my regular account since opening my account 11 months, and have managed to diversify into 169 different loans, which I'm happy with - however, I recently transferred in an ISA (for the same amount I have in my regular account), yet this was only diversified into just 13 loans!! The moral of the story is, "drip feed" your account, and if you transfer in an ISA, break this down into multiple smaller ISA transfers in (which would be an unnecessarily lengthy, time consuming and costly process, but it's currently the only way to ensure a half decent diversification across loans when transferring in an ISA!) That's why we desperately need auto rebalancing!! Not having this is the single biggest flaw/drawback of OC in my opinion
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macq
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Post by macq on Jul 13, 2018 17:19:41 GMT
One improvement I would like to see is some automatic rebalancing of portfolios so that no individual loan is too high a proportion of each portfolio. ^ THIS!!! I've been "drip feeding" my regular account since opening my account 11 months, and have managed to diversify into 169 different loans, which I'm happy with - however, I recently transferred in an ISA (for the same amount I have in my regular account), yet this was only diversified into just 13 loans!! The moral of the story is, "drip feed" your account, and if you transfer in an ISA, break this down into multiple smaller ISA transfers in (which would be an unnecessarily lengthy, time consuming and costly process, but it's currently the only way to ensure a half decent diversification across loans when transferring in an ISA!) That's why we desperately need auto rebalancing!! Not having this is the single biggest flaw/drawback of OC in my opinion thanks for the tip on ISA transfer
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bigfoot12
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Post by bigfoot12 on Jul 14, 2018 15:34:56 GMT
Some of the experiences of others, above, are similar to mine. Whilst I seem to be invested in over 200 loans, I have several loans which each account for more than 4% of my account. I have been unlucky in that two of my largest loans have gone late. My next five largest loans would be 15%+ in total.
I think that the rate I am earning is too low given the lack of diversification. I have sold all loans (that I can) in the last few weeks and withdrawn everything. But then I have redeposited a smaller amount. I will wait a month and redeposit some more, Assuming that this maintains diversification, I will continue up to about 30% of my previous peak.
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upland
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Post by upland on Jul 15, 2018 18:08:31 GMT
Some of the experiences of others, above, are similar to mine. Whilst I seem to be invested in over 200 loans, I have several loans which each account for more than 4% of my account. I have been unlucky in that two of my largest loans have gone late. My next five largest loans would be 15%+ in total. I think that the rate I am earning is too low given the lack of diversification. I have sold all loans (that I can) in the last few weeks and withdrawn everything. But then I have redeposited a smaller amount. I will wait a month and redeposit some more, Assuming that this maintains diversification, I will continue up to about 30% of my previous peak. I had been complaining about this lop sided diversification pretty well since this forum opened. Some sort of re-balancing would be a good idea. The real rate of return in relation to the risk may be worse than one thinks.
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littleoldlady
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Post by littleoldlady on Jul 15, 2018 19:53:37 GMT
If auto-balancing is too tricky to code quickly a quick fix would be to allow investors to specify a max percentage of their portfolio which could be invested in any one loan. To keep it simple this would only apply at the time of the investment, so it could go higher as a result of repayments of other loans. this would save the onerous procedure described by greatmarko above. |
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bigfoot12
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Post by bigfoot12 on Jul 16, 2018 14:25:08 GMT
If auto-balancing is too tricky to code quickly a quick fix would be to allow investors to specify a max percentage of their portfolio which could be invested in any one loan. To keep it simple this would only apply at the time of the investment, so it could go higher as a result of repayments of other loans. this would save the onerous procedure described by greatmarko above. I agree. Or they could change one of their own settings, no need to recode - A "maximum of 10% in any one loan" is simply too high, they could change that 10% to 2% without any effort. Or with only a slight change allow it to be user selected 10%, 2% or 1%, with a warning that setting it low would impact the speed money is lent perhaps. The strange thing is that I get items in my statement suggesting that some sort of rebalancing is happening!
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littleoldlady
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Post by littleoldlady on Jul 16, 2018 19:02:59 GMT
In their Help section they say:
"So that you don’t become over-concentrated in a few loans, we may periodically balance out your portfolio if more than 10% is held within a single loan.
We’ll do this by buying back your investments and spreading them out again across the loans you were previously invested in, plus enough new ones to ensure you’re sufficiently ‘diversified’."
But they don't say if this is a programmed or a manual process. If it is automatic then simply reducing the 10% would do the trick. If it is manual then it might be too much work.
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Greenwood2
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Post by Greenwood2 on Oct 20, 2018 9:46:37 GMT
How are defaults and recoveries now? The statistics page says last updated June 2018!
Seems very quiet on here is that because everyone is happy?
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