blender
Member of DD Central
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Post by blender on Jun 29, 2014 16:27:43 GMT
Hi deepblue,
I use my fingers, being old fashioned. Interesting project but I think you are publishing some information on your site that we could not on this forum. Are you thinking of offering a free service or is there some charge involved?
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Post by GSV3MIaC on Jun 29, 2014 18:38:53 GMT
Yep, the problem with publishing a live feed is that this info is only available to logged in FC investors (and maybe borrowers?), so under the T&Cs of your agreement with FC you shouldn't be making it available to all. It is a nice web page though, and your return stats are very impressive .. I have bots of several sorts (buy, sell, bid etc) but I don't deploy the secondary market one very often. I have one running to keep my primary market bids in play, most of the time (and a resell one runs at 00:40 most days). I spend most of the effort trying to make them cope with flakey FC website issues, and with trying to make them play nicely with the liveware users (minimise the website traffic, avoid DoS-attack bidding frenzy, stay under 10% of any particular loan). The FC website is rather poorly structured, so figuring out which loan parts are new, or which bids have/soon will fall out, can easily involve way too much asking for pages and ignoring 99.8% of their content.
How do you derive your 'live feed'? Do you scrape all 63,000 currently listed parts and then see what changed since the last scrape, or do you have some easier way
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Post by autobid20 on Jun 29, 2014 18:55:16 GMT
elljay: This post also falls foul of the "The forum may not be used by individuals to solicit loans or investments, or to advertise goods or services." rule and so has been deleted.
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bigfoot12
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Post by bigfoot12 on Jun 29, 2014 18:59:52 GMT
Has anyone heard any more of the API? When I signed up just under a year or so ago the API was imminent but i haven't head any more since.
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Post by GSV3MIaC on Jun 29, 2014 19:58:23 GMT
Last I heard was a promise of delivery (with some sort of sandbox testing system) 'early next year' (that was back in November 2013 IIRC). Since then silence, despite a couple of requests for update, but then getting any sort of info from the FC's tech folks is like pulling (hen's) teeth. Marketing folks - copious output, technical folks, zilch. I suspect they've quietly kicked it into the long grass and hope never to hear any more .. would make writing bot's rather easier.
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Post by elljay on Jun 29, 2014 20:07:26 GMT
[Mod hat on]
A reminder that you may not use this forum to solicit loans or investments, or to advertise goods or services.
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blender
Member of DD Central
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Post by blender on Jun 29, 2014 21:36:55 GMT
A good decision, mods. We had not established in the thread that it was 'goods and services' in the commercial sense but I think that pre-emptive action was the best way to handle - until someone convinces you that it was not 'goods and services'. If it looks like a duck ... etc.
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chrisf
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Post by chrisf on Jun 30, 2014 19:17:07 GMT
For the benefit of those who thought the B*****Bo* website was interesting (as I did), but can't find it now because you always clear your browsing history just before the wife gets home, it is at <snip by mod> No I am not advertising anything and I don't think anyone there is trying to make money off us anyway.
What I thought that web-site did show us was how primitive the FC projected return figure is, <snip by mod> has 73% annualised return but FC still reckons it will only make 5.4% estimate fully diversified. Anyway, the <snip by mod> website isn't much use when we can't order the columns to sniff out the good rates.
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Post by mrclondon on Jun 30, 2014 21:11:57 GMT
[Mod hat on] chrisf - whilst you may well be right that there is no issue here, there is a reason the mods are being cautious with this thread. Sorry. |
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pikestaff
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Post by pikestaff on Jun 30, 2014 21:51:15 GMT
Rather transparent use of ***s there by chrisf, although I found the website without this help.
The 73% annualised return is a bit suspect because AFAICS it is calculated on funds invested, which are much smaller than funds on the platform (unless I have misunderstood the LH graph). Even allowing for that, the results are impressive. It's interesting to see how much appears to be down to a couple of days of exceptional performance. Assuming it's real, the bot seems to be quite successful at sniffing out market anomalies.
For me though, it's just another reason to steer clear of FC. Everyone making money with a clever bot is taking money from the rest of us who are unable/unwilling to compete in a technological arms race.
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Post by davee39 on Jul 1, 2014 8:09:09 GMT
My understanding of the return, is that Loan Parts can be purchased at attractive rates and re-sold at a mark-up to generate a trading profit well in excess of the indicated interest rates. My risk averse strategy involves selling some of of the 'juicy' loans early, and where these have been purchased within 10 seconds I know there is a bot at work.
No buyer on the primary market is affected by this, but manual buyers on the secondary market are, because the best offers are being snapped up. Of course between Autobid and buy bots this is good for sellers.
A sad fact of finance is that there will always be someone seeking to exploit the gullible investor with a 'Make 50% in 10 minutes' pitch, so it is important that the mods ensure there is not the slightest suggestion of any attempt to market these through the board. In inexperienced hands these trading methods could lead to significant losses.
A final point might relate to the demands that these bots place on FC servers, and whether FC themselves could limit the conversation rate when dealing with excessive requests from a specific IP address.
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james
Posts: 2,205
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Post by james on Jul 1, 2014 8:14:30 GMT
Somewhat similar to PikeStaff, I want to know which platforms facilitate with APIs or otherwise tolerate bots so I can avoid those platforms. Thanks for discussing this here. It's interesting that in a previous discussion on the FC site it was observed by someone appearing to be a FC employee "Good points made. I'm persuaded of the need for action by FC. Thank you ... for bringing it to our attention." Given the claims of success by bot users it doesn't seem to have been particularly successful if the objective was to give humans a similar chance to bot operators. By way of contrast, Bondora made repeated modifications to their site to prevent bots from pre-empting most humans and users of their own Bondora-provided bidding tool on their primary market and only stopped those modifications when they had an effective solution in place. However, I do think that there are people operating bots in their secondary market at the moment, following the approach outlined by davee39 and assorted others. |
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Post by goldservice on Jul 1, 2014 8:40:03 GMT
When I read the original (pre-moderated) post I thought:
1 who would click on a link in a message to a public forum from a complete stranger? Or, having done that, would click on the further links on that page?
2 if someone discovers a foolproof way of making money, why would they tell anyone else?
3 the 'rapid resell' is meaningless: it should say 'rapidly put on sale' (whether the parts sell rapidly or not is another matter; there is no profit unless there is a mark up but then autobid will not touch it and the sale will only be rapid if the rate is competitive and that will constrain the profits), and
4 the alleged 73% annualised return is meaningless without other information.
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james
Posts: 2,205
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Post by james on Jul 1, 2014 8:41:38 GMT
A 73% annualised return seems eminently achievable from such tools. That's why there's a substantial economic incentive to create them that sites then have to deal with.
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is
Posts: 108
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Post by is on Jul 1, 2014 11:23:52 GMT
Somewhat similar to PikeStaff, I want to know which platforms facilitate with APIs or otherwise tolerate bots so I can avoid those platforms. Thanks for discussing this here. It's interesting that in a previous discussion on the FC site it was observed by someone appearing to be a FC employee "Good points made. I'm persuaded of the need for action by FC. Thank you ... for bringing it to our attention." Given the claims of success by bot users it doesn't seem to have been particularly successful if the objective was to give humans a similar chance to bot operators. By way of contrast, Bondora made repeated modifications to their site to prevent bots from pre-empting most humans and users of their own Bondora-provided bidding tool on their primary market and only stopped those modifications when they had an effective solution in place. However, I do think that there are people operating bots in their secondary market at the moment, following the approach outlined by davee39 and assorted others. I would welcome any addition to liquidity in FC secondary market, and the site by deepblue is impressive given the Web interface nightmare he must have had to deal with. Personally I am waiting for the API to become available and will put it to work to create a proper front end for primary & secondary market activity, as well as risk management, P&L and statistical analysis. Shame that FC T&Cs prohibit sharing of such software - meaning the benefits will remain concentrated. Without automation, FC portfolio management becomes extremely time consuming - there is no reason many thousands of loan parts need to be managed individually, so any volume investor will follow this route. What would be good is a 2-way market for loan parts - instead of just hitting the "ask", I would want to be able to place my bids and wait to be filled, like on any normal exchange. Now that would be a useful facility! One of many missing here, resulting in fragmented and illiquid market.
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