My review: a very small inactive aftermarket

My comments were related to the aftermarket, as I haven't been a lender long enough to purchase parts in new loans.

Do you have any plans to make the aftermarket more fluid, i.e. let people sell their parts with a different interest rate for instance?

Thanks.

I am aware of the new loans coming on, but as you said, not sure of the timescales.

If I assume that:
* a proper diversification would be to spread my money over at least 100 loans
* AC currently has 77 live loans (but only half where I could get my target met)
* and say 4 coming live each month (and I get the allocation requested each time)

then it will take at least a year to achieve my diversification target (assuming none of the original loans complete before then!).

As per AC's own wording: "expected losses across a diversified portfolio of loans to be circa 0.5%". If the definition of a diversified portfolio is at least across 100 loans (I don't know AC's definition), then my risk would be significantly higher than 0.5% for many months.
If AC's definition of diversification is to invest across 35 loans, then it's achievable quickly!

I was, of course, talking about the investment and its risk.

Loading £8K of cash onto AC's protected cash account, earning 0% interest, is not my idea of a definition of an investment.

For retail investors there is no primary / secondary market.  There's just a market, analogous to other platforms secondary market.  As others have pointed out you can browse up coming loans, setting a target in them for automatic investment once they draw down.

Mark down is a popular option amongst more sophisticated lenders and will be making a return sooner or later.  I'm awaiting a specification to be agreed by the rest of the directors as there's a lot of periphery considerations - how does it affect underwriters who have to sell a proportion of their holdings, how would users specify a mark down within their automatic accounts, should they even be allowed to, if not how does the MLIA then affect the other account's liquidity, should automated accounts buy discounted loan units, which users from which accounts should get priority for buying them, etc.  Take the example of a loan where two lenders have loan units for sale, one with a discount and one without.  If there are two lenders willing to buy but one will only buy if there's a discount offered, then for the platform and the sellers the best thing to do would be to match both sales every time.  But that's not necessarily fair for the buyers where a random factor should sometimes allow both sales, sometimes only sell the discounted loan units to the lender not requiring a discount and leaving the other seller and buyer without any sale.  That's fair for one buyer and fine with one seller but not optimal for the other buyer and seller.

So it'll make a return but only when its ready and when we feel we have suitable answers to those points.

Mark up is far more polarising.  There is increasingly vocal demand for this from some of our lenders but the wider lender base is indifferent at best, hostile at worst.

Secondary market is working well on AC, you just plug in your target and wait for the loan to roll in, yes it takes time, but only like tickling trout.

If you want to get a faster diversification then you need to roll into a bunch of P2P platforms, from my reading there at least 8 to 10 good ones out there where the software works well and the deals come through reasonably fast.  When you look at the diversification over say 4 p2p as I have it has taken me 4 months to achieve 1.2% spread, it just takes a little more time and thinking.

AC offers a very special form of lending and is trying to offer more alternatives which should be praised, however it has been the hardest one to understand of the platforms I use.

Yes, and for that AC is presently too small, that is why they are trying to grow and patience is required (or as they say, "if you know a better hole"). 

If you want access to secondary market just raise a target on a no-available loan, it comes....

Well actually, it was like that prior to the October Revolution (2014) - major software upgrade. Parts were sold manually, and there was an Autoinvest option as well.
Now the manual process is automatic, and the Autoinvest process is the same thing. However, AC call this a manual process (that's the 'M' in MLIA). Perhaps it should be called the Automatic LIA, but that could be confusing, because we're told that an automatic invest tool will arrive in future.

The automatic invest tool (not be confused with the old Autoinvest tool), will dynamically assign you loan parts based on your investment criteria. So, for instance, if you only want loans with a LTV less than 65% with a maximum exposure of 10% the system will oblige. I believe these criteria will be manually set up by the lender, but automatic defaults (settings not disasters) will likely be available. These will come under the heading BIA (Bespoke Investment Accounts). It's a bit like the GEIA, which automatically assigns you only Green Energy Loans.