Loans available at a discount (AC)

No it doesn't.  It's because the system is so slow to loop through the loans matching buy v sell orders so other people had the same idea.  I imagine there were 5 people who spotted it discounted and put in orders to buy so when it finally matched this loan it split the amount between the five (me being one of them).

I was going to post an updated discounted loans list yesterday but held off until this loan had matched so I could get as big a slice as possible.  It took almost 24 hours to match.

It is frustrating.  I think it puts a lot of investors off as if there is an amount to buy and you put in an order most people would expect it to be way quicker (most would expect instant).  I understand the reasons for it being so slow but chris has had a matching algorithm upgrade ready to go for many months now but it always seems to be knocked to the bottom of the release queue.

It would improve sentiment if investors knew they had an instant safety net of being able to recover their funds straight away when offering at a 'modest' discount (instead of having to wait up to 2 days) which benefits everyone.

I agree, I'm surprised that the new improved algorithm has been so slow to arrive. I think that it is poor that the website displays something that looks like a market place, but then it takes 15+ hours to execute.
chris , if you need any help with your new algorithm I am sure that there are many on here who could help, either with the algorithm itself or any compromises which need to be made to speed the process up. I, for one, am pretty good at algorithms (and I have a certificate).

Without knowing where you bottleneck is my suggestion is to exclude small transactions from the matching process during the day, but not during the night. So:-

At 7am pick a value probably between £1 and £10, for each loan match all transactions which might exceed that size and match them. If matching is still too slow increase the value a bit. After about 10pm iterate through all loans matching all transaction irrespective of size. If this doesn't complete by 7am, remember next loan to be matched and start from that point later that night.

As you already seem to exclude sales less than 1p, you seem to have some sort of test in your code so making the above change would seem easy whilst you work on testing your new (and very delayed) upgrade.

Wow, I didn't see that.  I get an alert when anything gets offered at 2%+ but nothing overnight.  

I have bought stuff at a 10% discount before....i know some people may be mad keen to sell but putting it up at a 3% discount would see it sell just as quick.

It's not a trivial task unfortunately.