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Post by Ton ⓉⓞⓃ on May 16, 2021 9:22:21 GMT
I'm just checking out Zopa again, I've had some money with them for more than a decade.
It's 45Mb and I can only get "Sheets" to open it to show ~1300 loans I can't believe that's 45Mb, has only one any hints or tips? In fact has anyone done any work on the PLB, to save me the bother?
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Greenwood2
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Post by Greenwood2 on May 16, 2021 10:00:09 GMT
I'm just checking out Zopa again, I've had some money with them for more than a decade.
It's 45Mb and I can only get "Sheets" to open it to show ~1300 loans I can't believe that's 45Mb, has only one any hints or tips? In fact has anyone done any work on the PLB, to save me the bother?
Just tried and I get about 65,500 in excel, with a 'didn't load completely'!
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aju
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Post by aju on May 16, 2021 11:10:09 GMT
That's very interesting they must have changed their mind recently as i was told they were no longer going to update this and even remove it back last year!. I wonder what date the data has on it or worse its even relevant. The lack of data being supplied to respected comparison sites, well by me anyway, like 4thway was the reason they recently stopped even rating Zopa as a company!. Edit: I couldn't resist so i went to www.zopa.com/invest/risk/public-loan-bookand downloaded the zipped file. The contents took seconds to download for me and sure enough the data in that file after loading into excel 2007 as a raw csv load is Dated: 06/04/2020 13:31 Filename: data_for_loanbook_extract_2020-04-01.csv The number of lines of data (not including col titles) is 734,079 exactly! csv filesize as defined in the zip file is 160,153,881 I simply launched the file directly from the zip file and it opened in my excel system The date of the data (1st column "Snapshot Date") is 1/04/2020 Last time i looked at it and complained about it being out of date as i said they finally came back to state they were no longer providing it monthly but rather they were hoping to move to quarterly. I guess it has some uses for back checking the state of zopa but it will not be showing anything like the current state of affairs. I can copy over their comments I think i posted it at the time on here as well. (Edit looking back now i guess i gave up on poking them they stated in my last email they were looking to quarterly updates as i changed the above to reflect) Perhaps someone should poke them again!.  |
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zlb
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Post by zlb on May 18, 2021 13:30:43 GMT
If it's filling up Excel, then I would usually have to be put into a database like MS Access - think discontinued but might be free version online as a result. A splitter like this, isn't going to help too much in analysing data, I suppose, www.filesplit.org/Maybe there's a cloud database? |
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aju
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Post by aju on May 18, 2021 14:40:28 GMT
That file has a long way to go to fill up excel 2007 at least last record in sheet (tab) is 1,048,576. I am of course using the offline version of excel 2007 - not sure there is an online version of excel 2007 anyway!. I would be surprised if that file did not load into the online version of excel too as its just a single table. Ok it might be a bit slow online but it should fit. Excel 2007 is still pretty fast even when jointing tables together. Mind you my monthly import of the old detailed statements took a bit of time to run but then it does/did have quite a few cross tables connections etc. Sadly i don't have anything else to work with - i did try using Access but to be honest it was too much work to learn it coming from oracle systems when i quit the rat race and excel is/was very powerful even then (2007) . I did try it originally with my loaders for the detailed statements but again it turned out faster just using excel tables. That of course is all academic for me now that detailed statements are no longer available with Zopa. You are right though a file splitter is not the best approach but you could put it into a number of sheets i suppose and join it together in a main table but it might be sometime before it out runs excel - not sure how big it might be now since it has not been updated in over a year. There are quite a few things one could do with the full loanbook but sadly its way too old now (unless they update it of course) to be that useful I feel. |
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zlb
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Post by zlb on May 21, 2021 11:21:18 GMT
so the general impression is that Z should provide the data in a form that can actually be viewed by domestic software...
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aju
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Post by aju on May 21, 2021 13:53:30 GMT
They may not actually want to provide the information anymore. My personal impression is if they don't supply relevant information to a respected site like 4thway then its unlikely they will supply to people like me.
For me its actually not an issue at present as i am extracting rather than committing to further lending so knowing how Zopa is performing every 3 months is not that great an issue. In my personal case the risks relative to benefits do not fit any longer others will have their own views. Perhaps this will change in the future but for the current situation i'd rather hang on to my profits as much as i can than commit further funds to Zopa. Others will have their own levels of risk they are happy to work with.
We do still have low 4 figure sums invested and are drawing down monthly until the funds are removed - probably another 18-24 months.
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Post by mfaxford on May 21, 2021 18:22:26 GMT
so the general impression is that Z should provide the data in a form that can actually be viewed by domestic software... If there's a million rows of data that might be getting beyond what you might expect domestic software to handle sensibly, A spreadsheet is probably the only "domestic" thing that makes sense and providing a csv file is the best way to provide that data. It might make it more manageable to split the data out by something like year the loan started, although that probably still generates some large files.
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Greenwood2
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Post by Greenwood2 on May 21, 2021 19:41:15 GMT
And I'm not sure many people want to see the whole loan book, individual loan books are big enough and more interesting to individuals. Do any other platforms give access to their whole loan book information?
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aju
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Post by aju on May 22, 2021 14:40:46 GMT
And I'm not sure many people want to see the whole loan book, individual loan books are big enough and more interesting to individuals. Do any other platforms give access to their whole loan book information? You have probably hit the nail on the head there, at least from zopa's perspective I guess. Id be happy with loan level payments info such as was available with RS until the demise!. That was useful but not very interesting. I did used to look at the Zopa loanbook every now and again when it was available but to be honest i'm not sure i got much out of it for the reasons you suggest. The thing is they used to supply a lot of things and have suddenly stopped!. I have assumed it's because they can no longer afford the time and effort for a lot of the things they have stopped supplying, however, what it could suggest is that the statistical info they now show is not 100% accurate fo ALL users. In our case their Core and Plus NAR charts etc don't reflect the true picture as myself and Mrs Aju have considerable numbers of Classic loans still on our accounts that are no longer included in the NAR info - as result i ignore the default levels reported for us. I have told them about this misrepresentation of default values that might confuse some people who assume they are better than they really are but I guess they are just noses to the grindstone with all the on screen flaws that this may be a while before it's corrected and made accurate. (The cynic in me says they have looked at the number of lenders affected and decided there are too few to be r'sed to develop that part but who knows.) Not sure what the regulators might have to say about this but i haven't reached that point as yet. There are a number of areas that have made me determine that ZOpa is no longer the same risk level it used to be and the following things worry me somewhat. Eg * There used to be a way on screen that one could see all the payments made and missed by a given lender (Very useful for seeing why/when they really stopped paying). Zopa rejigged the screens - about 5 years ago now i think - and we still had the ability to see our loanbook at a loans level but the additional payments level was dropped never to return. * Once the single loan levels payments was lost then one had to resort to downloadable statements detail levels. This was monthly level detail of all loan payments only. Pedantic people like me then created our own personal payments level reporting tools using excel and other useful tools. At this level one was able to see a number of oddities that did not show up on the old reporting tools so that was a bonus - sort of. One of the interesting things with the monthlies was that if one kept a running total of the data totals - i know i'm a sad git - one could see when things went wrong or changed all of a sudden, it is still when they finally get all the data back into the top level statements tables. It was possible then to drill down into the payments levels (old statements detail) and even spot errors that Zopa had found and in fact some did last for months before they were found and fixed. Also one was able to see errors that when presented to Zopa showed quite marked issues and even result in quite considerable compensation!. There is one bonus with having less data to play with i guess in that i get a lot more time to read the Times and Telegraph these days - no i don't like/agree their politics but their money pages are really useful as is Which Money magazine too. Oh well that's my slant on the missing loanbook, not just the data in it but why the potential obfuscation of it's loss given the errors in the screens we are now still subjected too. (I'm not sure it will ever come back but I'm hoping i'll be gone by then!) /RantMode OFF
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