oldgrumpy
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Post by oldgrumpy on Oct 11, 2016 17:05:25 GMT
My allocation has dropped from nearly 100% to 78% over the last fortnight (I haven't been watching to see whether that has been a steady decline). Presumably that has been caused by a series of repayments because the total in the portfolio has dropped also). I hope the 78% does not continue for more than a few days; I was expecting to drop in a bit more cash today.  So, at the end of September, apparently due to end of month repayments, my fund deployment dropped from well over 200 loan parts to well under 200 parts, and a drop from 99.4% to 78%. It is now October 10th, and I am still only back to 198 loan parts, with a deployment of 88% of that cash (ignoring the additional £400 I was silly enough to deposit last week, which means my current fund deployment is now actually at only 83.6%, after just £50 was used today). My headline current return rate 8.99%, so deduct fees and the cash drag effect and my rate currently is around 6.6%. Mmmm! Lessons. Don't fall into the trap of adding funds at the start of the month. Don't put much in at a time - it may linger for up to 28 days (BM says). Would it be possible to calculate and display the actual rate achieved on our own account after all fees and including the deduction to allow for unused funds? Overall. despite the 6.6% calculated above, over time, I think I have comfortably achieved the BM target 7% - but I don't have any exact idea.
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Post by yorkshireman on Oct 11, 2016 17:53:38 GMT
My allocation has dropped from nearly 100% to 78% over the last fortnight (I haven't been watching to see whether that has been a steady decline). Presumably that has been caused by a series of repayments because the total in the portfolio has dropped also). I hope the 78% does not continue for more than a few days; I was expecting to drop in a bit more cash today. So, at the end of September, apparently due to end of month repayments, my fund deployment dropped from well over 200 loan parts to well under 200 parts, and a drop from 99.4% to 78%. It is now October 10th, and I am still only back to 198 loan parts, with a deployment of 88% of that cash (ignoring the additional £400 I was silly enough to deposit last week, which means my current fund deployment is now actually at only 83.6%, after just £50 was used today). My headline current return rate 8.99%, so deduct fees and the cash drag effect and my rate currently is around 6.6%. Mmmm! Lessons. Don't fall into the trap of adding funds at the start of the month. Don't put much in at a time - it may linger for up to 28 days (BM says). Would it be possible to calculate and display the actual rate achieved on our own account after all fees and including the deduction to allow for unused funds? Overall. despite the 6.6% calculated above, over time, I think I have comfortably achieved the BM target 7% - but I don't have any exact idea. Time to go back to FC old boy? I’ve averaged 11.8% there over the last year through a strategy of “flipping”
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Post by stevefindlay on Oct 11, 2016 19:49:45 GMT
Following up on today's comments above - there's no magic here: we've simply had a lot more investment coming in (from new and existing clients) than lending opportunities we have been comfortable with.
We've gone from 100% invested across the entire platform a few weeks ago, to c.75% today. We will get this back up to 100% in the coming weeks and continue to aim to keep cash drag to a minimum.
Deployment and cash drag are important considerations, and so is the quality of the investment. We've reviewed 3,500+ loans and made 1,000 loan investments this year - we have had only 3 defaults - 2 with full recovery and 1 with 0.1% of capital outstanding still in recovery. So we are conservative.
Loans repayments and investments are processed daily. There is no month-end bias in either direction. For example, we processed 20 new loans today so a number of clients will have seen their allocations increase.
And remember, we don't charge any fees on uninvested capital. So it is in our interests to ensure funds are utilised.
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oldgrumpy
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Post by oldgrumpy on Oct 11, 2016 21:59:35 GMT
.... We've gone from 100% invested across the entire platform a few weeks ago, to c.75% today. We will get this back up to 100% in the coming weeks and continue to aim to keep cash drag to a minimum .... Oooo! That's significant! Hope it doesn't take too long .... makes planning for more investment difficult. Reminds me that I planned to send more to Wellesley when they had rates of 6%-7% but they pulled in so much excess cash that they've cut back to 2.35% at best to keep us away.
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Post by stevefindlay on Oct 12, 2016 7:52:08 GMT
oldgrumpy " I planned to send more to Wellesley when they had rates of 6%-7% but they pulled in so much excess cash that they've cut back to 2.35%"You've highlighted a very important point here, which is a strength of BondMason for our clients - as we aren't primary lenders we don't have the temptation to reduce rates to borrowers to wins loans and deploy capital faster (i.e. the principal-agent problem in action in P2P lending). This means that the headline investors rates (your rates) should be protected more effectively with BondMason. To ramp up lending speed, we look to add more primary lenders (who price loans sensibly). As the lending market is c.£20bn-30bn in the UK, and we aren't constrained to just P2P Platforms, there are plenty of opportunities. But there is a lead time to setting each up each new non-P2P relationship - hence why we may be under-deployed from time to time. But rest assured we are working hard to get these new relationships in place.
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littonowl
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Post by littonowl on Oct 14, 2016 17:15:54 GMT
Seem to be struggling to fill at the moment....opened an account for my dad about 10 days ago, and still only 15% invested, and despite being on the auto investment setting (2%?) he's got a spread of just 5 loans, all at 3%, presumably because of a real shortage of available loans...? Hopefully we'll see a pick up soon.
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oldgrumpy
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Post by oldgrumpy on Oct 18, 2016 17:41:13 GMT
My allocation has dropped from nearly 100% to 78% over the last fortnight (I haven't been watching to see whether that has been a steady decline). Presumably that has been caused by a series of repayments because the total in the portfolio has dropped also). I hope the 78% does not continue for more than a few days; I was expecting to drop in a bit more cash today. So, at the end of September, apparently due to end of month repayments, my fund deployment dropped from well over 200 loan parts to well under 200 parts, and a drop from 99.4% to 78%. It is now October 10th, and I am still only back to 198 loan parts, with a deployment of 88% of that cash (ignoring the additional £400 I was silly enough to deposit last week, which means my current fund deployment is now actually at only 83.6%, after just £50 was used today). My headline current return rate 8.99%, so deduct fees and the cash drag effect and my rate currently is around 6.6%. Mmmm! Lessons. Don't fall into the trap of adding funds at the start of the month. Don't put much in at a time - it may linger for up to 28 days (BM says). Would it be possible to calculate and display the actual rate achieved on our own account after all fees and including the deduction to allow for unused funds? Overall. despite the 6.6% calculated above, over time, I think I have comfortably achieved the BM target 7% - but I don't have any exact idea. Well things are not improving. October 18, and my deployed figure has continued fluctuating well under 90%, today my portfolio fell again to 192, with just an 82.6% deployment. This with my headline 8.91% will only result in about actual net 6.5% before bad debts. Steven has explained how this situation has come about, and what the platform is trying to do about it. The problem is that too many new investors need their cash deployed up to a reasonable level first when new loan opportunities arise. Existing lenders take a back seat, and cannot maintain a high cash deployment level. BondMason's <95% invested flasher must be on all the time!!! he'll have a headache! In the meantime - I'll be cautious, invest no new money until BondMason can use it, and see what happens on Nov 1 following end of month repayments. I'll pass on that Yorkshire stalwart's advice for now  . I'm averaging 12%+ on MT, SS with very limited flipping - no losses yet over one or three years. Ditto FF, though a couple of partial losses may be in the offing. Bondmason is supposed to be "dump your wedge and forget" .... not quite working out that way yet.
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oldgrumpy
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Post by oldgrumpy on Oct 18, 2016 19:31:00 GMT
Seems worse.
Rough calculation.
9% interest. 70% deployment, minus 1% fee on deployed cash: [ (9 X 70/100) -0.7] = 5.6% before bad debts and tax on the full investment.
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Greenwood2
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Post by Greenwood2 on Oct 19, 2016 6:27:40 GMT
Definitely not worth adding funds until the deal flow ramps up a bit. Under 90% deployed here too. BM are a victim of their own success at the minute, I hope they can grow without compromising the loan quality. They may have underestimated the bite size they need on good loans to satisfy the growing lender base.
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shuff27
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Post by shuff27 on Oct 19, 2016 7:32:19 GMT
Hard to know what proportion of BM lenders actively follow this forum, but if we all hold off from investing more funds for the time being perhaps that will help the flow of investments catch up?
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Oct 19, 2016 7:46:27 GMT
Hard to know what proportion of BM lenders actively follow this forum, but if we all hold off from investing more funds for the time being perhaps that will help the flow of investments catch up? Hopefully even non-forumreaders will realise that investing more while existing funds are <90% deployed is a poor use of capital. Of course, some might log in on a "good day", see that they're close to fully deployed and chuck more in.
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Post by wiseclerk on Oct 19, 2016 8:11:54 GMT
I am at 90.4% deployed, down from higher values in the past week. I have started only 1 month ago. My yield self calculated WITH accrued interest is 5.6%. That is okay for me considering it took a while to ramp up. Cash drag is a possible concern on Bondmason. Let's see how it develops going forward P.S.: stevefindlay 29664 shows finished with a repayment of 19.98 to me on my 20.00 loan part. Who ate my 0.02?  |
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mike
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Post by mike on Oct 19, 2016 9:56:21 GMT
For a hands off investment with "mid-table" returns BM ticks a fair few boxes. I've started during the last few months with a modest amount but would like to grow it to a decent size 5 figure sum in the future. The cash drag effect is my biggest concern. Assuming the objective is to grow the volume I'de like to hear something from the platform on how they intend to do that. If they are struggling at the moment and want to get bigger then this sounds like one of their major challenges.
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oldgrumpy
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Post by oldgrumpy on Oct 19, 2016 11:26:08 GMT
I await replies. I have loads of £10 bits paid back as £9.99 with zero interest. Some kind of "rounding" problem, though why it should amount to 2p missing on any account puzzles me.
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Greenwood2
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Post by Greenwood2 on Oct 19, 2016 11:51:27 GMT
The summary page all balances, so nothing seems to be missing. I tried to check the totals from the portfolio list against the summary some time ago, but without a download facility it's not easy. I think I found a slight difference in the summed interest compared to the summary value, that must have been compensated for by an equal and opposite difference in the capital (a few pence at the time). Too many transactions now to try to check again, probably just balancing rounding errors.
I haven't seen a 2p error (yet). And the capital always seems to be down, never up (that I've seen).
EDit: Re-checking I do have one more than 1p.
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. I'm averaging 12%+ on MT, SS with very limited flipping - no losses yet over one or three years. Ditto FF, though a couple of partial losses may be in the offing. Bondmason is supposed to be "dump your wedge and forget" .... not quite working out that way yet.
