A bad month?

I'm afraid the reduction in useful tools has been ongoing for sometime now, they do read here though as I have recently contacted them about the marked differences between loan rate in old MLB and newMLB data rather than just the expected 1% (in my case 0.5%) that I expected.

The initial answer that came back made reference to a comment on a forum. I'm assuming their reference was to my comment on another thread on this forum.

I just wish the new loanbook data was described in better detail.

My current understanding from their answers is that the rates in the new book remove the fees and also the safeguard contributions, apparently the old loanbook omitted these a gave the full rate. My thinking at the moment is that the data in the new book may be correct but may not be. This does not seem to quite stack up when I reproduce the old overviews that we had access too but there is too much difference in the data to get a handle on it. The period of worse differences is when the new loanbook started to be used and the old one started to get worse around Jan 2016 - Nov 2016 but that is only because the old loanbook csvs were pulled in Nov and my matchable data stops there.

I wish the old forum was still around if I'm honest as everyone who seemed to know this stuff better has moved on to other boards and I didn't really download the most useful forum threads in this particular area.

Having been following this thread I decided to check my loans in default and found there is a huge increase in February. I don't know if someone has been doing a bit of housekeeping and rounded up a lot of bad loans, or just a really, really bad month, but it looks unsustainable if this is repeated in future months. I have been in plus since the beginning so well into the 4 month default window.

Before I checked I assumed it was just a couple of big loans dragging my account down, I made the mistake of adding a biggish chunk at one point giving me bigger 1% bite sizes than I like, so really surprised by the number of defaults.

BTY is there any easy way to check this? I downloaded the all time loan book, sorted to get defaults on Zopa Plus, then trawled through the comments to get default dates. I have about 50 defaults in total, more than half of which seem to be in February.

Not feeling quite so chilled as I was.

that works ok if you only have plus ones but if like me you have any of presafeguarded that are missing its skewed mine actually says

For my book that page shows £2.88
missed this month from 

   7 borrowers (3.1%) have missed repayments for non-Safeguard loans.

The online loanbook using "Zopa Plus" in search field and sorting on the arrears field shows me that in fact 3 of my loans (I have 128 active Z+ loans) are in "Collections" at present - That's £30 worth of loans that are in jeopardy in z+ but realistically its only 27.77 and its still a potential loss not a real loss. When they move through the collections they will hopefully start paying something again.

Outstanding = 27.77
Interest earned = 3.07

so that is a potential loss of 24.7

In isolation that looks bad and my gain(across the whole) in feb of 49.12 is severely dented but over the whole period its evened out better. Only using the online tools I cannot actually weight this against the return on Z+. I need to resort to my spreadsheet tools and see what that throws up.

One other thing to bear in mind is that it takes about 4 months usually for a default to appear and it looks like its similar for collections.  

Interestingly these loans are D/E and are 17.33%, 24.5% and 27.50% I'm not that surprised they have failed to be fair.

Thats my take so far

Update:(10:30) Checked my z+ return so far (based on data pulled today) is (Figures in () are current loanbook)

Lent______1460__(1280)
Cap retnd__385___(205)
Interest____76____(70)
Arrears_____2.23__(2.23)

Thats over the whole of my Z+ book (10% of investment) since I first lent on Z+ in May and assumes all the loans are paying.

I started with £1040 in plus so for me i'm still up on the deal over the period. I extrapolated it forward for a year assuming similar returns and its running at about 8% if the collections turn good.

If they turn bad and no one else fails either then its running at 5.7% approx. So its not that great relative to the headline.

My Classic will pull this up a little but its clear to me that now we have Zopa plus we need better tools for everyone to be able to see a clearer picture. It doesn't take too many of the higher loans to drag the rest down considerably

Ah I see what you mean @greenwood2 perhaps we need a field that shows default date. Or zopa needs to go back to sending an email when the default occurs. 

For me I have changed the loan book on screen using stylish so I can easily see the comments better so I use the search field to find "set to default" and then scann down them using chrome search in page for "default". I checked the statements using "Tax year to date" to find that I had some actual defaults in the year and found that I could find them. Not sure you could do this without changing the report layout though or resorting to excel spreadsheet search in the comments field.

A field would work better as some of my real old defaults only have "[30/01/2017] Partial payment received." from 2009 this one is still paying very small sums, probably a penny!, perhaps thats another reason zopa pulled the ability to check defaults payments easily.

Update 1: I tried this on excel and there are a number of ways you could locate the relevant text again using "set to default" the simplest is just Ctrl+F and "find all" to locate the fields and then you can just look thru those. If you know how to use filters you could narrow the search to just defaults I think.

Update 2: Its curious I have new defaults since April using the tax year to date option but I can't seem to find 3 new defaults using the comments field search "set to default". Perhaps somebody spelt it differently ;-) Mind you I changed the search to ]set and only 4 actually came up and I know I have many more than 4 in total.

Looking at this a bit more carefully now I cannot see any of my loans that are defaulted over the last year (2 as per comments field) that add up to the amount zopa has recorded so very confused about it. What I can say is that if I were fussed to trawl through the actual statements i may be able to find the non payments but I don't think the statement we can see actually state what should have been paid. The only place that was available was in the old loanbook report that was pulled last year. 

From my perspective as an ex developer is that a comments field is not somewhere we should be getting this info from.

Not all defaults have default in the comments, many now just say 'Loan has been assigned to Zopa', the status is Default though.
Edit: And one of mine just says 'Bankruptcy order'
Edit: And another says 'IVA'

The problem seems to be with loans lent in last half of December + January. Next year I'll just hold off my investments until February kicks in. I assume this is something people would have seen every February as Christmas and January are especially hard months financially for a lot of people. Don't know if anyone can confirm that?