Bailed

 I put the whole lot in in one go.

Ouch!, hence the roller coaster look of the graph perhaps, although to be fair they do look quite a bit similar and I'm guessing they will look like mine too, if I could figure out the best approach in excel.

this could be what has caused your experience, you'd have loan amounts per borrower of 1% of that, but which Z keep quiet about... Eg they don't advertise the interest rates stating likelihood on only £1000 at a time deposited(therefore £10 loans). It would only take two defaulters at say £47 from within my £5k deposit to knock out my monthly earnings from a much larger, over all, account. I don't think that one is at the same statistical risk with more borrowers at £10 each. I made the larger deposit a long time ago now and my earnings are still being impacted by the £50 loans defaulting, rather than multiples of £10.

seems to be an awful lot of risk for not much return.

I commented above about Zopa wanting to make the diversification better and some of their issues with that but I do seem to remember that in the earlier days it was even higher at 2% and they moved it to 1%, I think!.

Not sure where the true risk is but one of the annoying things about defaults is the way they seem to have quite a small clawback rate lately. Perhaps its a factor of my increased lending, with increased numbers of defaults that its more obvious they are not paying back as much as they appeared to do for older defaults. Zopa has always maintained that its levels of defaults are not that high and their risk management and approach to lender checks was on point - the August 2017 admission of error excepted - but I've take recently to asking challenging question about those defaults that seem not to be bearing any fruits at all. Their answers were it was hard work but they are chasing aggressively, as we might expect - the fact there is little bearing fruits of these challenged is a little concerning.

so for me I have taken to investing larger sums, but in a measured way - £10 max loans by lending in < 1999 amounts at a time - and also making sure that relend activated. Our total return level at the moment - despite all the defaults seems to be holding up at between 4-5%. There is about 25% still covered by SG, which may be a factor in my favour currently. Also I made a decision early up to only ever commit 20% max to Plus. As a result I think my lending is on track for my needs.

Yeah, they said they made it better after August 2017 but I thought that only affected D/E loans, I do seem to get a lot of other defaults rather than D/E ones lately, perhaps that's result of the changes.

To be precise, it's not just 1% fee.

First you give up the accrued interest when selling, then 1% fee, plus any interest adjustment. In my case the worst interest adjustment is £30 for selling £330 loan part, 9%!!! Also, to slow selling process (up to 20 working days or even more) means another 1% chance that any loan parts goes late or default, especially in the plus case.

I only managed to get the 9% back after complaining to Z.