Love ebbing away (loan allocation concerns)

I do believe that steps need to be taken to reduced excessive gaming.  With the SM currently as liquid as it is (and no sign of any change), it's easy for anybody to max out their pre-funding (to their limit) and then just dump the difference back onto the SM, where it is just FFF.  I reckon that the BH might be the most guilty of this.

I wouldn't mind seeing bottoms up for the first million (regardless of the total loan size), and/ or forcing investors to keep their Pre-funding investments for a minimum of 3 days.  I think that this combination is going to help kerb gaming... not totally, but enough to make the platform fairer without upsetting the BH or the masses.

I don't want to get deep and make it psychological but I've got a wary disposition when it comes to money to the point that I think if I filled out the pre fund form and asked for 50,000 when I only had 5,000 to invest I would end up not sleeping over it because of the worry I might get asked to pay for 50000 I haven't got. But I can see that experts in the system don't have those worries because they have worked out you can just put it straight up for sale and get rid of the surplus in an instant. But I'm afraid I still have a bit of a mental problem with that approach.

I don't want people to tell me that if I worry about asking for £50,000 of something when I haven't got £50,000 that makes me unsuitable for peer to peer investments because there are other places where you don't have to do it. N I can understand up to a point where people are feeling the need to do it but I'm not sure if I can get into all of that because I like to play a very straight bat.

I can't help feeling that in the interests of the reputation of saving stream and how it works it would be better to stamp out the ability for people to deal in that way because it must put people off who like to play Straight and feel they are being treated equally and fairly and dont like having to compete with fearless clever dicks who know all the tricks.

If it's spirals anymore you could end up with the investors being a select group of clever people playing clever games and your average Joe who isn't that type of person or involved in the world of finance and wheeling and dealing will Drift Away.

I think it's in all our interests to have as many investors as possible and as broad a church of investors as possible because that makes the platform more diverse and stronger rather than having it all being reliant on a smaller handful of clever, technically minded, have no fear , finance merchants.

The original idea behind crowdfunding and the peer to peer thing was that all sorts of people could check in to fund investments and I think that's a good thing and it would be disappointing if it becomes only available to full-time financial whizz kids with piles of money and the average guy is squeezed out of the sector.


I don't really see how being cautious a bit should bar you from taking part and we all accept that you don't get 12% return without accepting risk so none of us is exactly risk averse in the first place. But to me it's another step up the ladder when you are talking about putting in bids for amounts you don't want or haven't got just in order to get invested.

Idea to suggest why saving stream couldn't have for the first day a limit of say 1% of the loan put investor and then after that open it up wider. At least at stage one everyone would be equal and could get up to the same amount and then if there was any surplus the big boys could come in and snuffle it up the next day so it wouldn't delay the filling of the loan by more than one day. The percentage you were allowed on stage 1 could be variable according to the size of the loan and the estimated number of active investors. It would lead to a bigger diversification of loan backers and a bigger spreading of the risk.

It looks like there could be another loan launch this week and I will be looking at it very closely indeed based on what I am learning and considering my position on it as regards my pre fund bid and the 3000 or so I still have sitting idle not earning in my available funds.

I have to say again I like saving stream very much and if I'm honest it has been a bit of a lifesaver for me over the last two years because I have not been able to work but I was fortunate to have quite a lot of savings behind me and I am able to get a decent living income every month from the interest without touching my capital so it's been important to me and I owe a great debt of gratitude to saving stream for helping me through this difficult. And now I'm finding it more difficult than before and I suppose I'm just feeling a bit frustrated but as others have said it's all about supply and demand and many more people are now on saving stream than they were a year ago and I suppose it goes with the territory and I can't complain when other people are trying to get some decent interest from their money just the same as me.

Hi harvey you really do not need to worry about prefund.. If it doesn't fit well for you, then don't use it, I don't , except rarely, I'm sat here now with a daft iPad , no mouse, and after a bit of excellent advice from elsewhere l just did £500 on the SM very very easily, which is not usually the case, but you can do all your business on the SM if you really want to.
edit.. Plus it's more fun and more interesting on the SM.

TBH I'd prefer the PF to stay just as it is, obviously for my own ,I suppose, selfish reasons, but there are rumours that SS are coming up with something to stop the over funding saga, all ends up on the SM shortly after so I'm always happy. 

harvey :  I think you are right to be cautious.  If I think a loan is likely to be oversubscribed, I do tend to over-PF a bit, but I'm always prepared to keep 100% of what I ask for if the allocation factor turns out to be a lot larger than I expect it to be.  Some day, people will be caught out by huge overbidding and won't be able to dump their excess on the SM before SS get rather upset with them.  I don't know when it will happen, or what the trigger will be, but it's probably inevitable.  Earlier this year we had a taste of this when a number of loans went live at once and the SM became rather stagnant for a while.  How SS handle their first big default when it happens also could be a trigger.

I think that the problem with a 1% scheme is that I expect there are a number of BHs who would be unhappy with that.  And because the BHs probably provide a big chunk of SS's funding, they can't afford to upset them.  There have been a couple of suggestions made on the forum that ISTM would help the situation considerably, and I do hope savingstream are busy working out how to implement them -- namely, insisting that any parts allocated to PF requests have to be held for some period (3-7 days?) before they could be sold, and allocating the first £1M (or thereabouts) of every loan bottom-up before allocating the remainder as a percentage of the remaining unfilled PF requests.

All I ask is that SS tell us about any allocation changes they'll be making before they implement them!

I think I suggested the simpler version of that some time ago - put everyone in the hat, and you either get all you asked for, or none. No point in overbidding.