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Post by spiral123 on Aug 1, 2017 15:16:59 GMT
£252,000 loan, two payments, going into liquidation !
I know it was a D - but even so
Quarter of a million pounds couldn't keep them going for more than two months!
FC investors £250,000 down, just another day in the life of the FC directors passing down dodgy loans to its customers!
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Aug 1, 2017 16:13:08 GMT
Dammit. I always considered this a risky one, but I was giving it until the 3rd payment before selling.
In retrospect, the signs were there for all to see:
-- Google shows its opening hours as "permanently closed".
-- Their website is down.
-- Oh, and this, from a week ago: <link redacted>
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fasty
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Post by fasty on Aug 1, 2017 16:27:11 GMT
Yes, <sharp intake of breath> This one has set me back equivalent of 3 weeks P2P interest. I had planned to give it a couple more months before flogging. Maybe I should spend any idle moments googling borrower names... this impending failure has been on the 'net for a while.
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Post by spiker on Aug 1, 2017 16:49:29 GMT
I see a director resigned a few days ago. (Apart from this there was no winding up petitions or ccj's)
Wonder if directors resigning in the period you hold a loan is a bad sign (obviously directors can resign for all sorts of reasons and not all will be bad)
But if you're a "short term flipper", it may be a good strategy to treat any such resignations with skepticism and just sell out and live to fight another day.
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Aug 1, 2017 17:20:01 GMT
I'm sorry for including the link with identifying information earlier ... silly, not thinking. For those interested, hopefully it is OK for me to say: if you Google the company name, the first page of results lists a trade website with a week-old relevant article about them.
Directors change for all kinds of reasons. Perhaps what more suggests a problem (retrospectively!) is the change of company address last Thursday from what looks like a reasonable place for them to be doing business, to what looks like it might be an accountant's address.
I doubt there is anything completely automated that could have seen this kind of event coming. There's nothing in the Gazette. You could spend your life constantly Googling your borrowers and checking their websites and facebooks for suspicious signs, but I've got over 300 to check and I'm sure some of you have a lot more! Mind you, if I had been doing that, I would definitely also have avoided my previous liquidation downgrade too ...
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Post by spiker on Aug 1, 2017 17:28:12 GMT
Mind you, if I had been doing that, I would definitely also have avoided my previous liquidation downgrade too ... Was this also on google?, gazette, companies house? Or how would you have had early insight?
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Aug 1, 2017 17:52:57 GMT
Mind you, if I had been doing that, I would definitely also have avoided my previous liquidation downgrade too ... Was this also on google?, gazette, companies house? Or how would you have had early insight? Regarding my previous liquidation event, the borrower's website changed dramatically. Where previously there was the usual glossy "we are a leading provider ... blah blah" tosh, there is now a single-page site saying something like "contact us if you have a relationship with us and we'll get back to you". If I had been monitoring their site, I probably would have known something was awry before FC. In that case, too, there was nothing in the Gazette until several days after FC pulled the plug. I wonder how FC get their information.
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ceejay
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Post by ceejay on Aug 1, 2017 18:29:50 GMT
Which begs an interesting (to me!) question...
How small a portfolio would you dare to go to if you had the time to stay on top of all your loans?
I mean, the standard - very sound - advice is to spread your investment across 100+ loans and just accept that some will go pop from time to time. (Although one might try to edge the odds by exercising some discretion in the loans taken on). But clearly if you have that many loans, or even more, then you have little chance of spotting rogue events.
But just suppose you only had, say, 20 loans, and a lot of money in each one. [No, I'm not advocating this as a strategy, this is just a thought experiment]. You'd get up every morning and check their websites, google the company name, check the gazette, and whatever else. Maybe phone them up as a customer and see if they answer the phone. If you did all that, would you be confident of spotting a bad loan before FC found out about it, so you could dump and run?
If you're acting on publicly available information you're not insider trading, so presumably legal! Though you'd of course have to be happy with yourself knowing that you were dumping a dodgy loan onto an unsuspecting investor...
Has anyone here been so bold as to go for the small portfolio option, and if so how many? And what strategies are there for checking up on your loans?
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Aug 1, 2017 19:09:43 GMT
But just suppose you only had, say, 20 loans, and a lot of money in each one. [No, I'm not advocating this as a strategy, this is just a thought experiment]. You'd get up every morning and check their websites, google the company name, check the gazette, and whatever else. Maybe phone them up as a customer and see if they answer the phone. If you did all that, would you be confident of spotting a bad loan before FC found out about it, so you could dump and run? I would not have confidence of spotting a problem in advance. I have another 2 loans which have entered liquidation that I don't think I could have caught in advance. Company A entered liquidation about 2 months ago. FC downgraded it several days before it appeared in the Gazette, and several weeks before any Companies House filings about it. Their website is, as far as I can tell, unchanged even now, and still touting for business. At the time of the downgrade, Google results didn't suggest anything was wrong. Company B entered liquidation and was downgraded also about 2 months ago. Again, the Gazette published the notice several days after FC, and Companies House was a fortnight later at least. The only suggestion prior to the event was a cryptic message on the company's Twitter along the lines of "there are exciting changes ahead" (it sounded good, not bad). It seems the company has folded and risen with a new name with the same bloke doing the same thing as before but minus the debt. The old website redirects to a new one. I suspect if I had called the old company as a potential customer, they would have been happy to take the business without mentioning the technicality that it is now a different company.
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Post by sanmiguel on Aug 2, 2017 12:25:35 GMT
I'm in on this one aswell autobid, at least you chose it lol
seems this company already had an outstanding fc loan at 8.3% and a question was asked why they were part paying it off with a new loan at 17.9%, shouldnt this have rang a few alarm bells when they applied for a new loan?
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ozboy
Member of DD Central
Mine's a Large One! (Snigger, snigger .......)
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Post by ozboy on Aug 2, 2017 13:12:14 GMT
I've never invested via FC, and never will. From reading the myriad comments over the past few months ISTM that their DD is non existent.  Mind you, that places FC in the exalted company of one or more other P2P Perpetrators Platforms.  |
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am
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Post by am on Aug 2, 2017 13:40:37 GMT
I've never invested via FC, and never will. From reading the myriad comments over the past few months ISTM that their DD is non existent. Mind you, that places FC in the exalted company of one or more other P2P Perpetrators Platforms. If you look at their statistics pages you will find (or at least would have last I looked) that losses do correlate with risk bands, so they must be doing some DD.
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Post by longjohn on Aug 2, 2017 14:11:13 GMT
That's annoying. My first D to go pop. Bang goes a 4 year record. My 'best before date' calculator might need a tweak.
Haven't lost an E yet but they only started two years ago.
J
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adrian77
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Post by adrian77 on Aug 2, 2017 16:08:29 GMT
REf FC investors £250,000 down
I guess another way of putting this is ,directors £250K up, ..wonder if this is connected to the director who resigned. Personally I think this sort of thing is going to rocket as FC strike me as a soft touch for some people. Granted most people in business are honest but the phrase "minority spoiling it for the majority comes" to mind. Personally I flip all my FC loans within a week and just make the premium...sometimes I wonder if that is safe!
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Aug 3, 2017 19:53:12 GMT
Personally I flip all my FC loans within a week and just make the premium...sometimes I wonder if that is safe! I shudder to think how much of each loan you must be buying in order to make worthwhile money doing this. Surely you can only be making a few pee on each £20 loan part. The annualised return is probably OK (5p profit on £20 capital in a week is 13.9% annually), but what about your diversity? How many loans are you into in a BIG way at any given time?
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