Secondary Market

One thing you should keep in mind with SS is that you are exposed to massive concentration risk, ie SS' credit.  Unlike P2P platforms where the lender has a direct loan agreement with the underlying borrower (with the platform only providing an administrative function), with SS they are the borrower (the underlying loans and security are just notional).  Were SS to go bust for any reason (fraud at SS or one of their large borrowers, failure of one or more of their large loans, liabilities arising from other activities SS undertakes which we may not even be aware of, etc, etc), then we would all be unsecured creditors, and in the extreme, could suffer a complete loss .  I understand that SS are in the process of restructuring so to reduce lender's exposure to their credit, but I have yet to review the changes/proposed changes and would be surprised if we are not still exposed to their credit risk in the extreme.  The risk of SS going down may be low, but you certainty don't want to much of your overall investment/savings with them if they do!

In theory, if you take your "Funding Circle total" and subtract your "Net earnings" you are left with the amount of cash you have deposited. I say "in theory" because one of FC's long-standing bugs is that loan parts go astray or get double-counted so this figure is always right. It should be a reasonable approximation, though, unless you were very active in last-minute bidfests.

To be honest, it would be worth going through your FC statements totting up your deposits, because it may be that your FC total is well out, and you would want FC to investigate it. I did it recently, I just went through each month in my FC statements, searched for "EPQD" (a unique string that only occurs on a deposit entry), and totted up the deposits. It took a couple of hours to do about 4 years of statements and I found my account was out by about 70 quid out, in my favour.

1) Yup, you've got it
2) Nothing official I'm aware of but I've had 10-15 early repayments over 300+ loans (in the last year)
3) If you buy something at a rate you like that's up to maybe 3 months old, that's fair enough. Personally I wouldn't buy loans older than that (I sell most of mine at 6 months, when the stats show that defaults start ramping up) but there are others who reckon its better to buy 18+ month old loans with a clean payment history.

With fixed rates just 10 days old, there are still a fair few "variable rate" loan parts available at rates well above the new fixed ones; this is unlikely to be the case for very long (and rates are dropping daily already).

Ok cool. This is what I have been doing already, buying some A+ and A property loans at discount or par with decent interest.

Over the last few days it seems like you can still get 18%+ on E loans through the 'bidding' market so if I want a few risky bits later seems like the returns are still there. I made my account about 2 weeks ago when people were still bidding for loans so but by the time I got round to putting some money in and bidding on a few everything started changing! Very confusing. That's what got me looking properly at the secondary market.

FC is kind of addictive, time consuming though. Maybe I should have gone for ratesetter lol.

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated

What I want to know (among other things) is who are the folks buying the 13 month (unsecured!) A+s at 6% (apart from autobodgers). A couple have now wandered in and gotten funded .. somehow..

No, Becky promises there's only been two people been naughty in the last week...

Firm Chastisement ?