Minimum Part Size, and other suggestions

At the moment you can buy (on rare occasions) the equivalent of the sum of your holdings, and then sell off the original bits and pieces.

I like your thinking (I may have tinkered with the idea myself ).  However, the ReCaptcha resets after a couple of minutes and gives you a timeout; after which you have to start the process all over again.

Personally; I buy £1 parts to provide a "bookmark" to tell me not to invest in a loan that I have done DD in, and didn't like.  When I am used to any obvious loan I dislike (for example the Hull loan) I sell the 1p to tidy up my books.

Further, if you sell off the bits and pieces all at once, then for the buyer they'll be consolidated into a single part.

If there's no demand for tiny loan parts, they'll just sit there until the next time someone is selling the same loan, at which point they gets consolidated into a single loan part with the additional units being sold.

When selling, I personally try to encourage this behaviour, for example:
- opening several tabs with all my loan parts, getting each to the final confirmation, and running through doing "ok" -> switch tab -> "ok" -> switch tab -> "ok" etc. as fast as possible.
- (for loans sold reasonably often) waiting until I see someone else selling parts of the same loan, and adding mine to them, allowing a buyer to take both together as a single loan part.


When buying, I'll sometimes leave my target buying amount larger than my intended holding so that I can then tidy up some existing shrapnel - but even if I might have done so in the past I'll not now buy for the sole purpose of consolidating shrapnel - that just generates even more statement spam!

I fundamentally disagree with your statement that it's not easy to deal with.

It's very easily dealt with in the short term, and can in fact be dealt with by you right now - leave the tiny shrapnel on the marketplace, and before too much longer (probably within a few hours at most) someone else will be selling more of the same loan, allowing a buyer to consolidate what had previously been multiple small loan parts into one larger part.

It is possible to sort the list of available loans by the available amount, so one way to avoid even seeing the shrapnel (provided there are sufficiently many loans with parts available to buy) is to use this sort facility and then don't scroll past loans which are below your preferred minimum threshold.


If at some future time, SS add filtering options to the available loans page, one such option could be to hide any loans where there is not at least £xxx available. I'd not see it as worth adding on its own though...

On this topic I would vote to leave things as they are!

Those people who voted for £10 or above, are clearly unhappy with the current system. So while I should perhaps have included a "status quo" option, my dissatisfaction is clearly shared by others, it simply isn't the majority view (amongst forum voters).

I must admit I found some of the reasons informative though, at least three being related to deficiencies elsewhere. Of these, two were related to speeding up the buying process, while another was to use shrapnel as a "DO NOT BUY" marker - which would be better served by the ability to attach notes!

NO. That is your BELIEF, and you may be correct, but it is NOT A KNOWN FACT.

Indeed, there's currently a thread about how the number of investors is calculated. I've also seen speculation that only about 1/3 of members who've signed up are active. This may mean they're happy to let their existing investments sit, or it might mean they've walked away entirely, dissatisfied with the system in some way. You don't know the answer to that any more than I do.

As for the idea that everything is perfect, even Lendy don't agree with you on that, after all, they've made two MAJOR changes in the last two months - one to the prefunding system, the other being the captcha system. And even excluding my own comments, it's quite clear that not everyone is happy about these.

Returning to the original subject of this thread. I find it amazing that people would vote to keep penny shares simply because they use them as markers for loans they don't want. A FAR BETTER system would be to allow users to attach their own notes to loans (255 characters should be plenty). This would not complicate matters greatly, but I guess you hate this idea, because it would mean a slight change to the layout - a horrid HTML <textarea> just below the PBL description.