The good ol' days

I'm thinking 'Cats and Pigeons' again... 
 Still there is a lot to be said for fairness, just as there is for a good old 'scrum'.
 I would be OK with a 1% limit for 24 hours on anything up to say 500k. Then maybe a 0.5% on anything above that. Mind you I can imagine that those with rather LARGER Funds to invest might complain that the little fish will be able to grab their maximum limit even below the % freshold. Where as they would consider such a small % investment as unfair.

 POWER to the Little Guy I say... They/we deserve the odd break 

Those of us around in the really VERY early days actually remember getting as many £Ks as we wanted into any and every loan at our leisure over several days .  That lasted for quite a few months - they really were the good old days.

We've been round this loop several times, and maybe it is time to go round it again.  If we were going to continue in the current scheme where it doesn't matter what you invest in, then I'd be reasonably supportive of a low limit, but as we're moving to a scheme where we have to care which loans we get into and which we don't I'm less sure.  Of course I can see the fairness of it, and it would get me into more loans on initial offering than I manage at the moment; on the other hand it would be limiting the larger portfolios to only the larger loans which are likely to be much less liquid and possibly have a very particular risk profile.  As things stand, it's possible (as attested by new entrants here) to diversify over most loans fairly quickly via the SM, so it isn't necessary to get into new loans at the initial offering, especially when these smaller loans don't have cashback offered any more.

As with all sites, the greater the deal flow, the less the problem presents.

Hi, I'm fairly new to SS, and was annoyed to miss out on PBL23 due to missing the notification of it going live. I was lucky to get on PBL24 however. Although there were a few investments of £20,000 or so, many of the bids I saw in 'recent activity' as it was being filled were small investor amounts, indeed, you can see the last 20 successful bids on each loan in 'recent activity', and they are not particularly massive. I just think it filled quick because of the limited opportunities available recently. I do agree though, I think some upper limit should apply up to the first 24 hours, similar to FS, although they are fill quickly these days too!

This is an interesting idea, but it all depends on deal flow.  If that continues at the current low level, any new loans would be dominated overwhelmingly by SS's larger lenders -- just as they are now without bidding limits.  The poll regarding investment size shows 7 out of 58 investors (12%) with more than £50k in the platform.  Using the example above, it would take less than 40 of those to fully fund the £200k loan.  I expect the poll is biased towards larger lenders, but even if it's off by a factor of five, SS's 2,000 member base would include more than 40 £50+k lenders.  So if this suggestion had been in place when PBL023 arrived, I don't thoink it would have made much difference.

I wasn't around to watch the Recent Activity for PBL024, so I don't know whether there were many huge -- as opposed to large (say, up to £10k) -- bids, so I can't guess how much of a difference this idea might have made to the funding of that loan.  It was half full pretty quickly, and available for about three or four hours after that, so it probably wouldn't have been necessary to limit more than a handful of huge bids to allow it to remain available for a few more hours and allow most investors who don't monitor the website constantly a chance to participate.

I do, however, feel that some sort of limitation is necessary if SS wish to continue to broaden their investor base, and they do need to make it possible for investors to start small.  Even investors who are perfectly capable of funding huge bids may not wish to jump in at the deep end with their first few investments.  I expect most would prefer to start small and see how the platform performs before increasing their investment to a substantial level.  So IMHO it's neccessary to encourage small investments. 

One of the drawbacks of sqh's suggestion is that it wouldn't be easy for a new investor to build up a large portfolio.  Using the example again -- and presuming the investor base is large enough now to fund nearly any size loan before any investment restrictions are lifted -- the £10k investor could invest only £1k in the next loan to come along.  When the loan after that arrived, they'd have an £11k account and be allowed to invest £1.1k.  It would take a total of eight new loans to increase the £10k account to £20+k, and a further ten new loans to increase the account size to £50+k.  If I assume that the 10% rule wouldn't apply to accounts smaller than £10k, and that their limit would be £1k, it would take ten loans to build the account up to £10k.  That makes a total of 28 loans required in order to build up a £50+k account.  Unless deal flow increases considerably, I'd guess that many new, potentially large, investors would consider the time required to build up an account to their desired level to be excessive.

ISTM that one way around this might be to allocate a certain portion of any new loan to bids of some amount or less, and allow larger bids for the remainder.  I'll admit I haven't given this idea a lot of thought, but maybe £50-100k would be reserved for bids of up to maybe £1k, and the remainder open to bids of any size.  The numbers obviously would be changeable from loan to loan, and adjusted as experience is gained.  The objective might be to set the 'small-bid' portion size and bid limit such that the loan would be available for 12-24 hours.

It's just an idea, and I have no idea whether it's feasible to implement within the limitations of SS's current system.  Any thoughts/comments/suggestions/criticisms regarding the idea would be most welcome.

It's one of those situations where you just can't please all of the people all of the time, but your suggestion seems to go a long way towards that.  It all depends on the relative numbers of people at each investment level.  It would be very difficult keeping the medium sized investors happy - I can imagine them feeling still squeezed out by the big guys, but with whatever the limit was too small to be useful to them - a new variant on the 'sqeezed middle'.  If it were easy to try out, then it could be a reasonable compromise though.

I don’t quite understand the need for a cap to early bids nor its fairness.



• Everyone gets a weekly notification email on the deals that are likely to be activated in the coming week and a mobile txt and email notification when a new loan is activated. So, if one has funds waiting for being invested, then s/he could simply pay more attention to mobile and email notifications.



• There is no need for keeping funds on hold in the SS account waiting for the next investment opportunity as these can be transferred after placing a bid.



• Late comers can buy missed loan portions in the SM at zero fees.



So, why everyone should be limited in the amount that they can invest in the first 24h?



The cap will definitely be at the advantage of investors who don't have time to check emails or txt messages - do they happen to be small investors too? Perhaps. It can be argued that if one plans to invest £50, s/he might have a smaller incentive to pay attention to new investment opportunities as compared to someone who plans to invest £10K. So, the cap will definitely be at the disadvantage of investors who wants to commit a large amount of capital. It would make very slow to invest large amounts of capital. How is this fair?

Why not a text an hour or two before the loan is released?