FC Secret Account Value Adjustments

blender

I have simply reported the explanation offered by FC last week for the observed material fall in my FC total in the absence of any defaults etc. So, on that basis, seemingly incredulous but true.

Perhaps the 'story' will change now that there is a complaint to deal with?

You mentioned using your net deposits figure to reconcile one's account, which is what I had done historically and had been confirmed in previous exchanges with the platform, "Total minus Accrued Interest minus Net Earnings and that should equal my stake as an exact multiple of £1000" as you put. Well, now FC's representative has stated that such is invalid and that it is not a correct figure. So if, as in my case the shortfall on that basis ballooned to close to £ 4-figures they are claiming the actual imbalance is <£100 and **** what it says on the dashboard. This also opens up the interesting possibility that claimed return figures are knowingly misstated.

'Dashboard'? Reminds me of ano site I once toyed with.

That formula is a definition, and not something that FC can argue about. Your FC total is your stake, plus net earnings paid, plus interest not yet paid. And your stake is also something which can be proved from the net of all your deposits and withdrawals, which are recorded facts on both sides and which does not include any calculated number. Making the stake a round number is just an easy check that nothing has gone wrong in FC's system - we can prove our stake level (from bank statements and emails) and expect it to reconcile with that calculated by the formula. If FC do an internal reconciliation which results in a mismatch between the calculated stake from the formula and the stake from deposits and withdrawals then they are in error, and you are on your way to the regulator (or an ex-gratia payment). I will say IMO, but cannot see how that can be wrong.

I can understand the need for small adjustments among available funds, funds lent and accrued interest - but not at the expense of the fundamental reconciliation between FC and the lender. 

I wonder if it's anything to do with an old bug relating to selling of loan parts...

Back in the early days, I'd accidentally clicked twice on the button to list a whole load of loan parts for sale when it hadn't seemed to take effect the first time, and the system erroneously listed the same loan parts for sale twice. There was no "delist" option at the time, so I reported it to FC, who temporarily shut down the "sell" and "loan parts" pages while they sorted the resulting mess out, and dealt with fixing up the monies for the loan part that actually ended up getting sold twice. In those days there weren't premiums to worry about, but I recall initially having a small residual error equivalent to the accrued interest on that loan part.

When the secondary market came back up that time, there was a client-side javascript mechanism to prevent the button being pressed more than once, and it stopped being possible to accidentally list loan parts for sale multiple times.

I wonder if some of the people operating selling bots have ended up bypassing this and other checks (which FC should ensure are all made server-side if they are not already!), resulting in a similar database state with the same loan part listed for sale multiple times. One would have thought this would be a database state that can be easily checked for as part of a regular sanity check, so that any bugs potentially leading to such a state would be squashed quickly, but given the slow response to other known bugs on FC's site, maybe not?

This would then result in the earnings being inflated as you would receive the premium and/or the accrued interest multiple times, and perhaps FC's fix-up mechanisms to reverse the impossible second sales when they occur are not fully reversing it?

Just a thought....

If FC has sold a lender's loan part twice, and two other lenders have paid but only one has the loan part, then that is something which has to be corrected. But not in secret and without trace or explanation.

Just ran a dictionary check on one of my accounts and found two 'sold twice' loan parts on 20th May 2014 - clean since then though (those two appeared without the markup entries, so rather than 'sold twice' I suspect the FC journal system burped somehow and failed to finish the first sale properly .. i.e. there was maybe just one secondary market listing, which got bought twice, rather than two secondary market listings for the same part.

(yep, by SM stage, each item has 4 numbers .. a SM contract/listing ID (different each time you list it I assume), a loan part # (fixed at loan accepted time), a loan #, and auction (page) # (both, separately, fixed at listing time) ... none of which can easily be cross matched).

So if you bought/sold those 5 parts on/around 20th may, maybe that was the same snafu?

Not guilty then. 8>.