First default

You're probably correct about the valuations overall but I doubt if FS were really the best folks in the world to value these 2 wheels especially with a cut off date at the end of the biking season. Plus of course, (me) being wise after the event, the Tigercat wasn't exactly the most popular of bikes in it's day and certainly didn't have a following like the recent V-Max.

On another point, I really do hope that FS manage to get more loans into the marketplace. I'm sure they are trying but it really is frustrating at times and I'm beginning to wonder whether it's really worth the time chasing a return on £50 here and there. Now if they could develop the platform, introduce a secondary market plus a shadow bidding facility then that would help. I understand why they do not announce a firm time when a loan goes live but really the platform should be robust enough by now - although probably not. So they need to drip feed. 

Same here, 11% is not for me but I'm not around tomorrow anyway so wouldn't be available to participate.

I hope fundingsecure manage to bring more loans forward as well.  I have missed out on the last two loans because I wasn't able to keep close watch on their website at the time the loans were released, and they must have been funded completely pretty quickly.  I suspect that Friday's loan similarly will fill very quickly, despite the reduced interest rate.  As someone who has been investing with FS for a little while, I'm having difficulty re-lending my loan proceeds as my earlier loans mature, and I'm similarly beginning to wonder whether it's worth the effort and attention required.

My experience with the website a couple of weeks or so ago suggests that it still grinds to a halt if many people try to access it at once, and others were reporting similar problems at the same time, so I don't think it was just me or my ISP.  I haven't a clue how much of this bottleneck is the result of the web design, or the web hosting, or might simply be caused by FS trying to keep costs down by not overbuying bandwidth.

I'm not too concerned about the lack of shadow bidding because most loans are activated within a very few days of being made available for investment.  The exceptions are the huge loans, but those are so rare that I can't get too worried about them.

The secondary market situation is more of a concern, most particularly because FS suggested months ago that they were working on that but have said nothing at all since.  They have been asked here for an update more than once, but have failed to respond every time.  How about it FS?  A bit of info -- positive or negative -- is a lot better than being silent and letting everyone speculate.

Finally, one thing I really don't understand about FS is the adverts that appear at the top of the P2PIF pages.  Why are they spending money in an attempt to bring in more investors, when they aren't bringing forward enough loans to satisfy the investors they already have?  I could understand it if they were having trouble funding loans.  In the current situation, however, more investors will lead to more frustration among investors, and that won't help the growth prospects of the platform at all.

I think my definition of shadow bidding and bugs4me's definition are different.  To me, shadow bidding means the ability to place a bid without having the funds deposited yet.  So you don't have to deposit money in the hope of being able to get a bid into an auction at the time it becomes available.  If you do manage to place a bid, then you have to cover your bid by depositing money promptly. 

What bugs4me seems to be describing is what I would call pre-bidding.  That allows an investor to say by some means -- B4M suggested an email to FS -- that they want to place a bid as soon as an auction goes live.  This would means they wouldn't have to be at their PC when the auction goes live, and would relieve the pressure on the website.  Unfortunately, with a typical FS loan that would fill quickly on the website, all pre-bidding would accomplish would be to move the scramble from the website when the loan goes live to the time the email goes out announcing that there's a new loan coming.  FS immediately would receive a flood of emails from investors expressing interest and the loan would be fully funded before it even reached the website.  All this would accomplish is to place an extra layer of work onto FS.  And until FS replied to the email, the investor wouldn't know whether they put their request in on time or whether their request had arrived after others had made enough requests to completely fund the loan.

While the ability to pre-bid would eliminate the need to be watching the website closely to see when the loan goes live, that need would be replaced by the need to be watching your email closely for the announcement and to be able to reply immediately.  I don't see that as a significant improvement.  Am I missing something?

ISTM that the only real solution is to improve the supply demand balance, hopefully by bring enough loan requests forward that all the available investment demand can be satisfied.  No doubt FS are working hard on accomplishing this, though, as I noted earlier, if the adverts they are placing to encourage more investors are having any effect then the problem will be getting worse rather than better.

I agree.  And as a consequence of the current supply/demand imbalance, I really think that the adverts appearing above -- and elsewhere, I presume -- are counter-productive to FS's success.  All they will accomplish is to bring in more hopeful investors, which will increase the supply/demand imbalance and website performance issues, and result in more dissatisfied investors.  To the extent that investors start mentioning in forums such as this their dissatisfaction due to their inability to invest, FS will gain a reputation that they'd rather not have and, unfortunately, once that happens it will not be easy to repair that reputation if FS do manage to bring supply and demand more into balance.

In short, I just do not understand why FS are trying to attract investors at this stage in their development.  Perhaps fundingsecure would care to comment, to  explain what they're trying to accomplish with these adverts.

Mike, no conspiracy here. 

The bassoon was listed with Howarth - but we had a separate offer which we accepted, rather than wait any longer in the hope of selling it at the higher price that Howarth (still) believed was possible.

We then collected it from Howarth, I would imagine that Howarth took a little time to remove it, although I haven't revisited their site since we collected the bassoon.

FundingSecure