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Post by spiker on May 10, 2017 12:56:02 GMT
What's allowed for one person has to be allowed for all, does 61,064 x 10 hits per minute sound a lot? Edit; there is a slow down of the site, most noticeable on the Loan Parts and Sell pages when an E lands, how many hits in the following minute do you throw at the site when 'detect E' returns a positive? I refresh the main loans page 10 times per minute, If an E become available I then 1) navigate to the E loan 2) press the buy button Thats 2 extra web requests...and will happen irrespective if a bot is used or not. Bottom line is I don't think bots are anything to do with the performance problems (as stated by FC themselves only 2 weeks ago)
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Post by padney on May 10, 2017 17:13:14 GMT
Hello! So I got this same email from funding circle.
I gave them a call to find out what the real issue is. The starting point for all of this was putting the loan requests page within the logged in area, which allows them to very easily see which users are creating what traffic.
The email mentions refreshes of the loan requests page as being the driver, but on the phone, it actually came across that their *main* issue is speed of loan part purchases.
I have a ~40 second refresh rate to look for loans, 6 seconds (10 loads in sixty seconds) seems a little fast to me tbh... I dont buy that many parts (around 3 or so) per loan. (edit oh and 4 seconds between each loan part purchase)
And yes, selenium is great!
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Post by spiker on May 10, 2017 17:45:49 GMT
So limiting the access to the loanRequests is not going to resolve their issue as they're still going to have a bottleneck on the buying...
Seems a pointless exercise...
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Post by nightmare on May 12, 2017 6:36:31 GMT
What's allowed for one person has to be allowed for all, does 61,064 x 10 hits per minute sound a lot? Edit; there is a slow down of the site, most noticeable on the Loan Parts and Sell pages when an E lands, how many hits in the following minute do you throw at the site when 'detect E' returns a positive? I refresh the main loans page 10 times per minute, If an E become available I then 1) navigate to the E loan 2) press the buy button Thats 2 extra web requests...and will happen irrespective if a bot is used or not. Bottom line is I don't think bots are anything to do with the performance problems (as stated by FC themselves only 2 weeks ago) So are you going to cut your refresh rate down to 1 a minute or leave it as it is and see what (if anything) they do? If (just for the sake of argument you understand) I'd happen to have a bot then for the meantime I'd change my refresh to 1 a minute and see what happens. Obviously if I did have a bot this will no doubt hit my returns but for the meantime I'd be taking a watching brief on developments, after all half a loaf is better than no bread at all.
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metoo
Member of DD Central
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Post by metoo on May 12, 2017 13:39:34 GMT
I presume you all know this board is monitored by the overlords.
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Post by spiker on May 12, 2017 14:47:39 GMT
Yes, I'm being open and honest.
Its not in my interest to bite the hand that feeds me.
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stub8535
Member of DD Central
personal opinions only. Not qualified to advise on investment products.
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Post by stub8535 on May 12, 2017 16:14:37 GMT
spiker how refreshing to see a gamer displaying openness. It allows users of the platform to decide if they want to play on the uneven field or to go elsewhere.
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metoo
Member of DD Central
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Post by metoo on May 12, 2017 16:16:06 GMT
There are still 4 running aggressive bidding bots including one who has taken 26% of a loan this afternoon!
For the record, I've never had a bot. I wouldn't have a problem with a bot that was well behaved and not greedy.
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fasty
Member of DD Central
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Post by fasty on May 12, 2017 16:29:18 GMT
There are still 4 running bots including one who has taken 26% of a loan this afternoon! For the record, I've never had a bot. Oh, did I miss something tasty this afternoon? One of the bots often buys up stuff that I am disposing, like today some tired old "C" rated loans at effective rate of only 11.1% after a 1% premium. Why does it buy so low? Not that I am complaining...
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pikestaff
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Post by pikestaff on May 12, 2017 17:18:46 GMT
Risk. Flippers take little risk. Grab all and sell at premium. Majority gets bought. Whats to declare at year end jmun terms of income? 0 tax 0. Capital gain 0 as incentive to trade. Tax 0. Nonsense. Flippers are traders and their whole return is taxable as income (as a trading profit). Any flipper not reporting to HMRC on that basis is asking for trouble IMHO. Lenders who are not traders but make capital gains won't be taxed on those gains if they were the original lender, but the reason has nothing to do with "incentive to trade". Rather, it's because gains on "simple debts" are not taxable for the original lender. FC used to say that gains on second-hand loans would not be taxable either because of the way they structured sales. However, they changed their tune about a year ago and now say they may be taxable. See "Taxation on sales of loan parts for a premium or discount" at support.fundingcircle.com/hc/en-us/articles/214636966-What-are-the-tax-consequences-of-lending-as-an-individual-(NB FC does not deal with the tax position of flippers!)
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Post by soakaway on May 15, 2017 16:15:04 GMT
Hi all, I came across this thread since I'm looking at creating my own bot that works similarly to the video padney linked to. Any advice on how long I can expect to spend on it? I have a background in development but not specifically with bots. Any good resources to get started or even better anybody willing to share any code?
I'm also concerned about site updates and the amount of time I might have to invest in constantly redeveloping. Are they worth it in your experience?
Thanks
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Post by grahamreeds on May 15, 2017 20:20:41 GMT
Think of it as a learning experience.
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Post by padney on May 19, 2017 21:32:27 GMT
Hi Soakaway,
So I am currently re-writing mine in C#, basically it just uses the selenium library for everything, using xpaths on basically everything I need to interact with.
The first step I did was to get the selenium library interacting with all the bits of the website I needed to. I then made a class that handles all that, and then worked out all of the logical steps as to how to go from knowing what loans are available through to bidding.
Suggestions:
Sometimes clicks don't work due to the website being slow/broken. You might need to have more than one go at something until it works.
Especially if you DO have multiple attempts at anything, have a robust way of checking you don't over bid. Check the bid amount field on the bid screen, check available funds, check the numbers change as you would expect
Make your code NOT behave dangerously if any of your data retrieval goes wrong due to website changes. (for example don't look at your bid amount and keep clicking until it goes over your target bid value. What happens if the reference changes and it now turns out what you thought was your bid amount has turned into something like the loan term field?)
And make your code kind on the funding circle website, they are actively looking for bots which are not.
Dont stick your username/password in the source code and carry the source code around in your pocket on a thumbdrive!
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Post by padney on May 19, 2017 21:34:40 GMT
As to if its worth it, well that is questionable. If you want to learn coding, its a great excuse to do it. If you want to think "well my time costs X, and I want to do X much better than I would have done without it", then well you will need a fair bit invested in FC. Tens of thousands or so.
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Post by spiker on May 20, 2017 7:15:08 GMT
Agreed You'd need to be investing about 20k to make it worthwhile. Theres a lot of time and effort to code the bot and regularly monitor it to ensure its behaving. Although its quite a fun project, and selenium is a great skill to learn. Useful for helping get tickets to events as well! Especially with Wimbledon coming up  |
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