That website again ..

The bots failing to cope with FC website tinkering perhaps 

Don't bother trying to keep up with the bidding wars at the end of a busy auction with the new "improved" loan pages. It's a hundred times worse than it ever was before. It's almost unusable.

The finish of auction 7372 was absolute chaos, with less than 10 seconds to go it appeared that I had in excess of £1K placed at 12.3 and 12.2 yet finished up with 2 bids at 12.2, refreshing the page or continually clicking the bid button makes no difference, the whole process appears to have degenerated into nothing more than a lottery. As a consequence my account balance was approximately £1k down for at least 10 minutes after the auction closed which says to me the site is totally unreliable.

I’m familiar with the cut and thrust of business, I have no problem with competition provided it is on a level playing field and there is transparency and accountability but this was downright outrageous.

Either the site isn’t fit for purpose or it is being overwhelmed by bot bidders or whatever they are called, whichever it is FC or the regulator probably won’t give a damn let alone do anything which IMO indicates that P2P / P2B is becoming as opaque as the mainstream financial sector.

I’m all for a stress free life Mark but when I’ve adopted that strategy I’ve usually been over cautious and bid too low, leaving me with parts that are well below the final rate, perhaps forum members might care to start forecasting target bid rates!

Following my earlier comment I checked my FC account transaction statement for a different matter and found that it only shows 2 bids on 7372 whereas I made in excess of £1k worth of bids, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence in FC’s systems.

Can somebody explain the logic of that?

<hits the dread Autobid tab>
OK, so default AB rates are 5.6%/A+, 6.5%/A, 7.3%/B etc. Let's say AB has £50k to lob on any one auction without breaking the diversity rules.

A new auction comes up. A+, £100k, 0% filled, 15% current bid is in.
A vertically unchallenged bidbot comes along, and splunks £80k in there at 14.9% or whatever.

But why wouldn't AB then splunk £50k (or whatever) at 5.6%?
100% filled, £50k at 5.6%, £50k at 14.9%, £30k of 14.9% sat crumpled on the floor next to the bin.

I presume the suggestion is that AB will ignore that auction and put the £50k onto the next one instead, to try to level out the fill %ages? If there's <say> five auctions on the go and less than £250k of AB money, then - yep - that theory would work.

Equally, I can see that being a REALLY easy bit of market-gaming for the AB-fiddlers at FC to stamp out. Just remove or downplay that %-leveller. After all, no auction stays short of 100% filled for very long... not least because that'd mean nice high %ages.

In the mean time, it doesn't actually negatively affect anybody manually bidding.

The only people who might suffer from it are the few auctions that NOBODY finds attractive enough to manually bid on, even at 15%. And, let's face it, FC shouldn't have even approved them in the first place.

Yes, 11% is my target also.

With 1hr 18m left and top rate 12%, my bet is to get some of this ..... 10.9