Website comments and questions

For everyone else's benefit, I've looked into this for markr and whilst he's fallen foul of the advanced settings import issue that I've previously discussed, he did have AI targets set on all the loans he's mentioned along with a history back to April of them being set and adjusted.

Well new site certainly seems to be be very active in buying and selling.  

I've 142 transactions in just over 24 hours!  I can just imagine the size of transaction statement I'll need to check if I'm offline for a week or two.  

But I have managed to pick up assortments of less-commonly-available loans so helping adjust my portfolio balance.     (But I hope only from willing sellers!)

chris loan#31 appears in the list generated by the filter 'loans im not invested in' under Browse Loans but doesnt appear listed if i select 'show all current loans' or if i do a search I get no results.  Not sure this loan is still current, has no repayment schedule, no capital or LTV. Might be an extension but no evidence/disclaimer/recent activity to indicate this. 

Not so Chris, I have not had AI enabled before and did not intend to, but now I cannot simply purchase / sell nominal amounts of loan as before. Two issues:

1) Upon the switch, new targets were set based on existing holdings. Meaning if someone had an amortising loan with no AI enabled, the system will now try to "top up" nominal exposure whenever a payment is made. This is unauthorised by the lender, whether or not they see it as desirable, and the switch did not let people "opt in" but rather converted all to the new system.

2) The way to mimic old behaviour for me is to set all repayments to go to cash account, then manually modify the target on every amortising loan to match the intended nominal holding before I am able to use the cash again to buy more of other loans (otherwise moving cash to the investment account may result in AI trying to top up amortised holdings). Painful, don't you agree?

I am going to scream (again) in a moment.

Having switched the MLA to withdraw Repayments and Interest, gone through and reset all the MAI targets to what they should be for amortising loans to amortise and what I actually bought not what I might have put in the AI before it was edited or disabled,  put up for sale all the loan parts that the MAI bought that I don't want and had not instructed it to buy plus a few more to release funds for a shadow bid settlement,  I note that my Cash holding has increased but not by the expected full amount. Ok thinks me, I will check my statement to see what has and hasn't been sold. So since all yesterdays MAI transactions were in the statement accessed via the three bars Icon on the MLA summary I go there and what do I find absolutely no transaction records beyond those the MAI made yesterday. So I go the the reports tab and click on the statement (which supposedly only reposts CA transactions) and low and behold all the transactions that have taken place today, presumably since I switched off automatic reinvestment, are in this report. This is now a major reconciliation nightmare as it appears that my CA is selling loans in my MLA, and it will potentially only get worse if I stay with AC and dabble in up coming their Green and Automated products.

If the CA and MLA are separate accounts then there should be entries for the loan sales in the MLA statement and matching pairs of transfer entries in both the CA and MLA to show the transfer of the funds from the MLA to the CA. After all I have a matching pair of transactions showing cash being transferred from the CA to the MLA

With the greatest of respect to the ingeniousness of the new system, a system that doesn't have a "do nothing" option seems to me fundamentally flawed.

As mentioned on the other thread, a target represented in the database by a "null" value or an absent record (depending on exact schema and what other fields are in the same record) can be used to represent the "do nothing" option. This should then be the default for any user who had never set an AI target for a loan, nor performed any action on the new system to cause the target to become anything other than the default.

Using that solution, a "null" target could, in calculations where "null" isn't valid, be replaced with the actual current investment amount, so that rather than any need to actively amortise the target, it would simply always appear as exactly equal to the current investment.


The relevant database queries then need consider (e.g.) only those users who have a target set for the loan under consideration, rather than all users, thereby needing to access fewer records, and potentially improving the overall efficiency of the system.


If a target is set for a particular loan (whether manually, or as the result of matching one of the yet-to-launch products), the system should of course seek to maintain that target by buying or selling portions of the loan unit as necessary. However, if no target is set, the system should leave that loan well alone - neither buying nor selling portions of the loan on behalf of the user.

To be clear - a brand new user, or a user who never enabled AI on the old site, would have the target for ALL loans initially "not set". Only if they actively opt in to some product that causes a target to be set would they gain a target for any loan.

You have more than one virtual bank account with AC now.  One is your cash account, you have one each for each of the products.  When you withdraw funds payments can be redirected straight to your cash balance, hence appearing on your cash statement.

You have one statement per virtual bank account.  We could route everything via the product account and then back to the cash account but no doubt we'd then be criticised for all the extraneous transactions.