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Post by fuzzyiceberg on Feb 15, 2016 16:10:38 GMT
Yes, Zopa have intimated they will open their non-safeguard D and E markets to retail lenders. If they do, they will need to do a whole lot better with their new loan book to enable people to monitor these loans, and the bad debts that will be generated. Just out of interest - what do you mean by "monitor these loans"? What is involved in loan monitoring and what do you achieve by doing it? P.S. No sarcasm intended, I'm genuinely intrigued. 2 reasons to 'monitor' zopa loans imho: 1) to try to assess the impact of safeguard payouts on late SG loans. These are effectively the same as early loan repayments and are, of course, disproportionately higher rate (lower credit) loans. It has never been clear to me whether Zopa's quoted target rates (3.8% shorter, 5% longer) takes account of this effect or not. If anyone knows, please tell! 2) to monitor the progress of my non safeguard loans where I bear the risk of late payments and defaults. I accept there is nothing I can do to actively manage these (other than sell my whole laon book), and they are increasingly of less importance as they run off, but again they (or rather defaults) do disproportionately impact overall returns so I like to keep track of them. I do not bother looking at 'on time' safeguarded loans.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Feb 15, 2016 19:47:00 GMT
I was horrified by what I found!  I turned re-lending (ATU) off and started withdrawing almost exactly two years ago. When I looked at MLB, however, I found that I have over 100 loans that I 'acquired' in Aug/Sep/Oct of 2015! I'll obviously be writing to Zopa immediately to complain about this, but my question for the forum is whether this is a known problem, or whether I've been singled out for this incredible system failure. Hello Mike, No, sorry to disappoint you, you haven't been singled out, yes, it is a known problem and yes, you were right to be horrified! There is a thread on the old Zopa forum "My Loan Book" started by ZopaTash in August 2015 with the following comments: <"We would like to make you aware of an administrative change that will be made to a small selection of micro-loans this month for technical reasons. The changes have no adverse impact on borrowers or lenders. You will see the affected micro-loans in your Loan Books as having closed and immediately re-opened. The borrower interest rates displayed against these loans will be reduced, by a maximum of 0.1%. We have adjusted the loan servicing fees (that are not currently shown in the Loan Book) on these loans, so all lenders continue to earn the same rates on each loan. Our team is working on updating the loan books so they display accurate lender interest rates."> If you have time, I recommend you have a look at the thread and I think my comment #16 raised some pertinent questions. I ended up with approx. 1500 duplicated loans. One of the issues was that when the loans were closed and reopened, they were not necessarily closed with 100% repayment, often leaving a couple of pence short. In Sept or Oct, Zopa made a capital payment as compensation for this shortfall, in my case amounting to about £30. I queried how this was accounted for because the figure for all time total repayments was never amended and the loans in question still show less than 100% repaid. However, in the New Loan Book, these loans are shown as closed and nothing outstanding but still only 99.9x% repaid. The closed ones do not appear in "My Current Loan Book", just in "My All Time Loan Book". If you were not aware of it at the time, you will now see in "My Current Loan Book" a number of these loans that were re-opened in Aug/Sept/Oct 2015, so to you they would look like newly acquired loans. And you will see the duplication (both the closed loan and the re-opened loan) in "My All Time Loan Book". : Thanks for the info. I had already given up on Zopa and started winding down my account by the time that thread started, so I guess I just didn't pay enough attention to it. This does, however, bring up an interesting potential opportunity now... When I decided to exit Zopa, I RR'd many of my loans so that I could move my investment to other P2P platforms. Since loans were RR'd from newest, I stopped RR-ing when I found that the next loans to be RR'd would have included too many with rates I was willing to keep. Looking at the loans affected by the closure/reopening of last summer, however, I find that all but half a dozen of them are at less than 3.5% -- including one C1 loan at 2.2%! As a result, I'd be more than happy to RR all of the affected loans. So my question is... If I RR some of my holdings, will these be the loans selected for disposal inasmuch as they are the most recently dated ones in my portfolio?
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elgerod
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Post by elgerod on Feb 17, 2016 2:37:48 GMT
mikes1531 , That's an interesting point, but unfortunately I don't think it will work quite like that. The Zopa website says: <There may be situations where the interest rate on loans you wish to Rapid Return is lower than the tracker rates available that day. So that other lenders can still take those loans from you, an extra amount needs to be credited to them. This amount represents the extra interest they would expect to earn if they lent out the same amount of money in a similar loan, but at the current rate. In order to minimise the effect of these credits when you use Rapid Return, we will prioritise loans that meet – or are higher than – the going tracker rates, and then order by youngest loans first. If the requested amount cannot be reached just using these loans, we will then start to transfer loans at a lower rate, starting with the smallest differences in rate.>
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Greenwood2
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Post by Greenwood2 on Feb 18, 2016 17:12:31 GMT
Now being able to view the Zopa forum, isn't it depressing to see that Fosrock opened a thread to say goodbye to the forum, but nobody else had a chance to reply.  Really bad job Zopa. |
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woodie
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Post by woodie on Feb 18, 2016 18:02:58 GMT
Please squirrel it isn't the same without you
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Feb 18, 2016 19:53:58 GMT
mikes1531 , That's an interesting point, but unfortunately I don't think it will work quite like that. The Zopa website says: <There may be situations where the interest rate on loans you wish to Rapid Return is lower than the tracker rates available that day. So that other lenders can still take those loans from you, an extra amount needs to be credited to them. This amount represents the extra interest they would expect to earn if they lent out the same amount of money in a similar loan, but at the current rate. In order to minimise the effect of these credits when you use Rapid Return, we will prioritise loans that meet – or are higher than – the going tracker rates, and then order by youngest loans first. If the requested amount cannot be reached just using these loans, we will then start to transfer loans at a lower rate, starting with the smallest differences in rate.> : Thanks for the input. While these loans of mine are quite low rate, they're nearly all A* so the rates on those may not be any lower than the going rates for A* loans. It used to be possible to see what the current 'tracker' rates for loans were. Is that still possible? If so, can anyone provide a link to the appropriate page?
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Post by fuzzyiceberg on Feb 19, 2016 19:12:07 GMT
Only rates quoted that I know of are 3.8% for the shorter basket and 5% for the longer. I guess you can choose which basket to RR from and it will simply pick the highest rate laons first.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Feb 20, 2016 2:37:08 GMT
Only rates quoted that I know of are 3.8% for the shorter basket and 5% for the longer. I guess you can choose which basket to RR from and it will simply pick the highest rate laons first. There used to be a chart showing the range of rates in each risk band, but it wouldn't surprise me if Zopa did away with that in their drive to make their system as black box as possible. RR didn't use to select loans by rate. It used to go by date -- newest first -- but skipped over any loans where the rate was so low compared to the 'tracker' rates that the seller would be asked to pay the new invester to take it from them. I suppose the only way to find out what would happen would be to RR a small amount and then try to work out which loans actually were sold. But I'm not sure it would be worth the effort.
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james
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Post by james on Feb 20, 2016 5:43:27 GMT
<There may be situations where the interest rate on loans you wish to Rapid Return is lower than the tracker rates available that day. So that other lenders can still take those loans from you, an extra amount needs to be credited to them. This amount represents the extra interest they would expect to earn if they lent out the same amount of money in a similar loan, but at the current rate. In order to minimise the effect of these credits when you use Rapid Return, we will prioritise loans that meet – or are higher than – the going tracker rates, and then order by youngest loans first. If the requested amount cannot be reached just using these loans, we will then start to transfer loans at a lower rate, starting with the smallest differences in rate.>
To paraphrase that in a form that makes it easier to understand: 1. If you have loans where their interest rate is above the current tracker rates, we could match the tracker rate and pay you a higher amount than the remaining capital owed. We won't do that, instead we'll use it to pad up the average tracker rate that lenders get so we can charge higher fees to borrowers while keeping their APR the same at a lower interest rate paid to lenders. 2. The profit to be made is highest on more recent loans because those are the loans with longer to run. To maximise our gain we will sell the youngest loans first. 3. If we run out of loans that are at a premium price, we'll sell loans based on the smallest rate difference, ignoring the term. If that means recent loans we'll sell those even though your capital loss may be greater than if an older loan with less time to run was sold. 4. Yes, we know that there may well be people who'd be happy to pay you a lower than current tracker interest rates so you could avoid this capital loss. Our system doesn't let you do those deals. 5. No, we won't use some of the profit we made from selling the loans at above tracker rates to cover some of the losses from selling the ones at lower rates. 6. Yes, we know that this means we sell your best paying loans and leave you with your worst paying loans. 7. We aren't evil, we don't pretend that you originally lent for less time than you did like RateSetter does, and also charge you even more of a capital loss because of that. 8. We make the rules. Sucks to be you, doesn't it? While some of that is decidedly tongue in cheek in how I've described it, I think it accurately reflects the financial effects for lenders using RR. Makes some of the newer players like Ablrate, MoneyThing and SavingStream look like paradise by comparison when it comes to secondary market selling.
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Post by fuzzyiceberg on Feb 20, 2016 11:04:57 GMT
Or: Ifyou want to sell loans the cost is - 1% fee to Zopa
- a reduced return on your remaining loans portfolio as we will first sell loans paying at or above the tracker rate, if there are not enough such loans we will reduce the value of loans we have to sell that are below the tracker rate to reflect the difference in the rate.
All clear and transparent.
Some folk might like a fully fledged 'loan exchange' where loans can be traded like equities, but Zopa, reasonably in my view, does not want to enter that business.
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elgerod
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Post by elgerod on Feb 20, 2016 17:08:54 GMT
Only rates quoted that I know of are 3.8% for the shorter basket and 5% for the longer. I guess you can choose which basket to RR from and it will simply pick the highest rate laons first. There used to be a chart showing the range of rates in each risk band, but it wouldn't surprise me if Zopa did away with that in their drive to make their system as black box as possible. Mike, Yes, there is a chart. From the Dashboard, go to "View more about lending", then go to "Read more about rates". Then for 4 & 5 year loans at 5%, for example, you get a chart like this: Detailed rates (after loan servicing fee) A* 1.7 - 6.5% 31.4% A 2.0 - 7.4% 33.0% B 4.9 - 10.0% 18.6% C1 6.8 - 17.0% 16.9% And then each line breaks down into size categories (small, medium, large, extra large) with rate bands for each.
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Post by Ton ⓉⓞⓃ on Feb 20, 2016 17:11:47 GMT
... There used to be a chart showing the range of rates in each risk band, but it wouldn't surprise me if Zopa did away with that in their drive to make their system as black box as possible. This chart looks similar, but it's just called "current lending rates" no ref to RR or tracker rates (but these are the rates after loan servicing fees) secure2.zopa.com/lending/ratesCrossed posts
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Feb 20, 2016 20:46:55 GMT
... There used to be a chart showing the range of rates in each risk band... This chart looks similar, but it's just called "current lending rates" no ref to RR or tracker rates (but these are the rates after loan servicing fees) secure2.zopa.com/lending/rates & Ton ⓉⓞⓃ: That's exactly the data I was looking for. Thanks. With the range of rates on loans depending on their size, I'll have to look to see what size my loans are and how their rates compare, but with some rates currently sub-2% I ought to be able to get rid of some of those reorganised loans. But it looks like I'll have no chance of disposing of the 2.2% C1 loan until it's the last sellable loan in my portfolio! Another question... Looking at the current MLB display, I can't see the total loan size in order to be able to tell whether a loan is S/M/L/XL. You used to be able to select which data you want to display, but I don't see that option now. Am I not looking in the right place? Or have Zopa deleted that useful feature? If the latter, then I guess I'd have to download the CSV to find the info I'm looking for.
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Post by Ton ⓉⓞⓃ on Feb 21, 2016 9:25:06 GMT
This chart looks similar, but it's just called "current lending rates" no ref to RR or tracker rates (but these are the rates after loan servicing fees) secure2.zopa.com/lending/rates & Ton ⓉⓞⓃ : That's exactly the data I was looking for. Thanks. With the range of rates on loans depending on their size, I'll have to look to see what size my loans are and how their rates compare, but with some rates currently sub-2% I ought to be able to get rid of some of those reorganised loans. But it looks like I'll have no chance of disposing of the 2.2% C1 loan until it's the last sellable loan in my portfolio! Another question... Looking at the current MLB display, I can't see the total loan size in order to be able to tell whether a loan is S/M/L/XL. You used to be able to select which data you want to display, but I don't see that option now. Am I not looking in the right place? Or have Zopa deleted that useful feature? If the latter, then I guess I'd have to download the CSV to find the info I'm looking for. It seems that Zopa have massively simplified MLB, so the only place that I know of where to get that info is the old MLB,which is being phased out but is still available for the moment goo.gl/dM50SO but I've not looked at the downloads for that info.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2016 17:28:06 GMT
Hi all,
Hope you all had a good weekend.
Just a reminder that the Read Only version of the Zopa Forum will only be up available until 17:00 on the 29th Feb. Feel free to take any screen grabs of the info for your own lending purposes.
Thanks,
Mat
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I turned re-lending (ATU) off and started withdrawing almost exactly two years ago. When I looked at MLB, however, I found that I have over 100 loans that I 'acquired' in Aug/Sep/Oct of 2015!
