Blatant Manipulation ?

Does this really matter?  After the huge bids on 11443 the loan was not accepted early and a more normal bid spread has emerged bringing down the rate.

We seem to be at a stage where flipping is less likely to be profitable and loans are going at close to MBR, the question then is whether these rates are acceptable after fees and predicted losses, and if better rates are available elsewhere. There appears to be a global lack of activity across the P2B platforms so a lowering of expectations may be needed across the board.

There are lots of indications of botness which can be gleaned without FC's privileged access to HTML headers .. bidding rates in excess of one a second (but that's hard to verify unless the bidding runs for a LOT of bids in the same minute - 10 or 20 bids in a minute are possible manually .. although a really fast bot can get 10 bids in with no intervening bids from anyone else, which is another indication), responses to new auctions, and to being knocked out, in 'very short time' (again, an Indian click farm or someone with lots of time on their hands could do it too), double points for responding to bids knocked out on a 24/7 basis (humans - mostly - sleep sometimes), unintelligent bidding (only a (badly programmed) bot would stick £100k of bids into a £30k auction (because FC was lying about whether it was full yet) .. yep that was the tall one). However FC is pretty open (every time I, or anyone else here, complained about it) about not giving a hoot about whether bidding and buying was manual or scripted, as long as it didn't break the platform. Want to buy 90% of an auction in £960 pieces .. step right this way Sir!

I suppose it is possible that JCB****n was 'taken down', but I suspect it is more likely they got fed up with the game and moved elsewhere. Afaik none of the bot operators show up here under their real name (except me, of course) so it' hard to inquire, and FC don't publicise what they are doing in this area.

As a platform user I'd be delighted, but amazed, to hear that big players were not getting a special deal .. but the whole WL thing is exactly that. However when it comes to automated bidding / buying, I don't think anyone NEEDS to have a sweetheart deal, because FC basically doesn't have any published/enforced rules at all (despite it having been suggested, requested, and moaned about many times). If you recall when C-s first appeared and were 'desirable' (the 10.5%? rate being way higher than anything else at the time) there were lots of complaints about certain flipper bots buying the whole lot (at MBR, thus unable to be displaced) within 5 or 10 minutes of the auction appearing .. FC's response was basically to ignore it. That problem went away, but only because 10.5% for a C- ceased to be attractive (i.e. guaranteed resale 5 minutes later at 9.x% ceased to happen).

The same is happening to most auctions right now - the rates (at the close) are too low to be attractive to flippers (and to many other buyers too), so the two big players are sat hunting for the early closes, which is a rather low yield game. With enough 'real lenders' and fewer auctions, the desirability of flipping (and the need for flippers, or underwriters or whatever you want to call them) goes away.

I have never managed to do more than three per second through Chrome on a Windows PC. But I only use one 'hand'. Still agreed faster than GSV suggests.

Update: just timed myself to do 25 bids and took 5.6 seconds, then looked at all bids and saw that JCB****** was bidding at the same time and is slightly quicker than me

The gangly one has just taken out about £33k of the 2% Cashback property loan; in the standard bid size of £960.

£660 Cashback! But one presumes he is going to have to hold it all to term though. Desperate times call for desperate measures perhaps!

Yes, that'll teach me to wait until it is nearly full before venturing in .. it went from 'fairly full' to 'closed at MBR'  between bites at my sandwich.