AC - QAA a staggering 3.75%

I've tracked down the issue that was breaking things.  The single user who was blocking the aftermarket for the loans they were trying to invest in was also breaking the queue of funds waiting to get into the QAA which was causing anything that tried to bring funds from the queue into the QAA pool to break whenever it got as far as their entry.

Their queue entry somehow managed to commit to investing funds that were no longer in their account and that threw the system.  I've added an additional check to make sure that each time the queue is processed each entry is checked against the currently available funds.  As far as I can tell the lender's queue entry got into this state due to a race condition I hadn't accounted for.  A race condition is where two operations happen in parallel that affect the same piece of data, and the order in which they occur affects the outcome in a way that it shouldn't - such as two operations affecting the balance with the first adding funds and then adding them to the queue but a second transaction taking those funds away in the time between the funds being added and then being credited to the queue.

Resolving this has unstuck all the operations I've just tested and appears to have allowed the aftermarket to resume trading on all the loans it's tried thus far.

People should also be able to change their QAA settings without error, withdraw funds from it, etc.  Such a huge knock on effect for what was a tiny error requiring two lines of code to fix.  But race conditions aren't something you can always test for as you're talking about timing effects measured in microseconds.

Sorry I didn't get it fixed yesterday.  By the time I got home from the board meeting I was absolutely pooped and didn't trust myself to make any coding changes.

It depends on how you invested it.  If you had the funds automatically invested straight from your cash account and then transferred the funds into the QAA to invest directly that would actually end up uninvesting the funds and placing them to the back of the queue waiting to get into the QAA.

Yesterday there was also a bug which was preventing the queue from investing properly which has now been resolved.  This may have also played a part.

The aftermarket is now up and running in full again which should hopefully cause some churn in the QAA as lender funds are deployed, so queued funds should slowly shuffle into the account.  We're also debating upping the £1m cap.

Now that the supreme technical challenge of making the same money go round and round in ever decreasing circles has been cracked, could AC please focus management attention back onto the core objective of writing some new loans? I'm struggling to remember when the last new loan draw-down took place (sometime in the late 1980s was it?) but I've got all my fingers and toes crossed that there might be another before Xmas

Speaking from experience, it’s wrong to have a key person tied up in a meeting when a major operational event is taking place.

Whilst they should delegate to their subordinates they also need to have their finger on the pulse of the real world and not engaged in, what in my experience, are sometimes no more than all talk and no action and merely a stage for some individuals to preen their egos whilst playing politics.

As I have said elsewhere, many company directors and not a few IT departments have no concept of the operational or production side of a business.

I'm not saying this happens at AC or attacking individuals but as I said elsewhere, if the cap fits, wear it.

I notice a very minor bug.  I had £9 in my Cash Account (held in the QAA).  When I transfer £2 to the MLIA, the Cash Balance then shows zero (this is the cash balance, since the £7 is held in the QAA).  If I refresh the screen it now correctly shows £7.