david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 22, 2016 13:44:20 GMT
/mod hat off I see from today's update that the voted-for (not by me, chums!) recovery plan fell at the first fence. How does that pop song go .. "We won't get fooled again!" .. something along those lines. Come on ReBS, just send in the killer-attack-lawyers and dispense with the 'Mr Nice Guy' stuff. 8<. I voted to accept the borrower's replayment proposal, not because I trusted him to stick to the plan but because the loan security is his house, and the courts will only evict him if we can demonstrate that we have given the lender every possible opportunity to repay the loan.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 22, 2016 8:28:06 GMT
Not that I want to do this but I can't see anywhere on the BM site any automated mechanism or information on how to "sell-out" if one wanted to get their money back. Any idea what the mechanism is? If you click on the Withdraw button (top left of the summary page), it offers the option to liquidate some or all of your funds. I have not used it. I seem to remember the website rather vaguely says they may charge up to 2% for liquidating but I could not find any more specific explanation of this charge.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 19, 2016 12:17:30 GMT
SS obviously need to have the bank account details for anyone who wants to withdraw funds, but do they receive details of the source account for incoming funds? If I send a FP to someone, does my bank supply the details of my bank account to the recipient? If so, that seems rather unnecessary and would appear to create a security risk for me. I don't thiink your bank does disclose the information, but the transaction is tracable if needed The bank must supply the details of the source account for incoming funds. I have paid Saving Stream from two different accounts, and now when I withdraw money there is a drop down menu offering a choice of those two accounts. I did not tell Saving Stream those account details.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 18, 2016 16:08:11 GMT
Anyone tried withdrawing funds from BM? I registered hoping just to put in a trial £100, but minimum is £1000. I don't feel great putting £1000 into something so new, but at least would be assuring if I thought I could withdraw easily if needs be. Today I did a test withdrawal of spare cash that took less than a day between my initial request and money sitting in my account. That included the time for an exchange of emails to confirm the destination account number. If you needed to liquidate loans first it would take a lot longer. I don't know about payments less than £1,000 either in or out.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 18, 2016 10:32:09 GMT
(3) Platform docs (a) New to P2P - you may like to see our new P2P Lending Guide (there's a link to this from our home page) (b) Unique selling point - this should be the 2 key points on our homepage landing area: "Effortlessly earn....(7.0%)" and "We spend hours every day sourcing investments from approved P2P Lending platforms (so you don't have to)" Perhaps we should expand / elaborate on this further. (c) How to use - all of your FAQs suggestions are good; and we will add them to the FAQs page over the next 24-48 hours. Thank you. Please feel free to email me with any other questions / concerns which we can answer and also combine into FAQs for the benefit of everyone invest@bondmason.com Steve Thank you for taking the time to reply to my post. I will look forward to the platform improvements. Sorry that my third point was ambiguous. Having got bored out of my mind spending two hours learning nothing from reading your repetitive performance boasts justified only by your own estimates, scattered throughout every section of your website, I am asking for a reduction of the quantity of what is currently on your website, to make room for the missing factual information in the FAQs. No way would I have invested if I had found your website before reading the far more informative real information on this forum. Sorry that I cannot list everything that you need to explain in your FAQs. I hope that the 10 questions I listed previously might get you started. You might then want to look critically at every icon or heading on every page and making sure it is fully self explanatory. As a more experienced P2P investor I realise my needs are more demanding and different from some of your audience - I have tried to suggest a logical approach that meets the needs of all of your target audience. David
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 15, 2016 20:17:14 GMT
Any blips on here are down to my minimal skills Well, if yours are minimal skills I shudder to think what maximal skills could do. I use your availability tracker regularly to get an overview on the way the market is moving. Thank you for your valuable contribution to this community.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 15, 2016 18:37:21 GMT
david42 , with the greatest respect, I think you're suffering with the same thing that struck me when I tried to trust BM enough. I think with BM, if you're a seasoned P2P lender, it's difficult because you feel so out of control and blind to where your money is going. BM is useful alongside the other platforms I use because: - I do not have time to do sufficient due diligence on the loans I invest in. My loan diversity and platform diversity is limited by the amount of time I have available. I would like to reduce my time investment while increasing my P2P exposure. - A common mode risk for me is that I am choosing all the loans I buy. BM will choose a different set of loans which gives me diversity of risk assessment. - I mainly see BM as a filling the diversity hole left in my portfolio by my shrinking RS 5 year holding, with much better accessibility, less management effort and hopefully slightly better rates.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 15, 2016 16:50:23 GMT
Three suggestions for improvement.
1) Reducing drag of un-invested funds
When I manage my own loans on other platforms, I will usually choose to accept a lower diversification spread when that is necessary to remain fully invested, then I diversify later.
You could significantly reduce the drag from un-invested money if you did something similar by letting me select a higher allocation limit - e.g. 10% - to apply whenever I have un-invested money, then spreading the loan between more of your lenders later to achieve a 1% allocation target in the longer term. Extra complexity for you to administer re-allocation of loans, but increased returns for lenders.
2) Improved loan information
I appreciate your concern about sharing full details of the platforms you use. But you are asking us to trust totally in your modelling and risk assessments without the benefit of enough history to statistically justify your estimates and models. As a compromise to give us a slightly better feel of what we are exposed to, would you be prepared to publish a list of the platforms where you have the largest holdings? Something like the following table buried in your statistics section would give those of us who care a far better feel of our exposure:
These are the platforms with the largest holdings of our loans by value on 1st July 2016 (hypothetical example) Value Platform 18% Market invoice 13% Funding Circle 12% Saving Stream 9% AJ property investments (a specialist property bridging lender and definitely not just a bloke we met in the pub) 49% spread across 8 other platforms
3) Restructure the platform documentation.
I opened my account today to hold alongside my other P2P investments, thanks to the positive discussion on this forum. But I learnt nothing but generalities from wading through the reams of documents scattered randomly around your platform. Just assertions ad nauseam about returns and risks justified only by your own models and estimates. If it was not for the 5 pages of discussion in this post I would not have persevered. Please look at your platform documentation critically through the eyes of a lender. Your audience has three types of questions: a) Marketing for those new to P2P. One document on your front page and no more, covering P2P in general and P2P risks. b) Your platform unique selling point. Two or three paragraphs and no more outlining what you do that is different. Your unique selling point should be about 20 times shorter than the plague of repetitive boastful waffle currently cluttering up the site. If you have not persuaded someone to invest in the first two paragraphs they are not going to invest. c) How to use the platform. The factual operational detail that is currently missing should be in your FAQ section in place of the current marketing hype. The missing detail is too long to list. Here are a few obvious examples to give you the flavour: I have so far failed to find anything about how manual investing operates compared to auto investing. Under what circumstances do you charge 2% for withdrawals? What does the 'borrower type' mean on the loans list? What is the difference between a loan reference and a "receiv refere" in the loans list? Is one of these the same as the "Investment Reference Number"? Why is the asset security a padlock? What is the clock symbol on investment status? Why does my current return of 7.63% show as half full on the dial behind the number? Why does the time for withdrawal depend on my total investment, rather than the amount I am withdrawing, and why is that information not in the FAQ on withdrawing money? It was buried in some other document that I can no longer find.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 14, 2016 21:35:51 GMT
On Saving Stream the referer gets 1%. there is no bonus for the friend
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 11, 2016 16:50:09 GMT
sl75 , thank you for your summary of the four possible swap trades. We agree that a swap market is most relevant for case 2. 2. Loan A and loan B are both difficult to buy on the SM. Action: keep trying to buy loan B, and when you're successful, resolve the negative balance by selling loan A (which will occur "almost instantly", because it's also difficult to buy). Note: this is a case where a "swap" can be potentially useful, but it's unclear why the platform should favour "swappers" over those who are investing fresh cash into the platform in order to buy loan B...? With the current secondary market the swap can only take place if someone wants to sell loan B - a rare event. But a swap market would allow this transaction to take place even when no one wants to sell the scarce loan B but they are prepared to swap it for a different scarce loan. This opens up a whole new set of balancing transactions that cannot currently take place. The platform does not need to favour swappers over those who are investing fresh cash. The number of people selling scarce loans for cash is not reduced just because non cash loan swaps are taking place. For example, I would like more of scarce loans PBL100, PBL101, and PBL102; I would be prepared to swap these for other scarce loans, including DFL002, PBL092, PBL093. By waiting for people who are prepared to sell these loans for cash, I still have 95% of this transaction incomplete after spending many hours sitting at a terminal. The majority of lenders will have imbalances within their holding of scarce loans and they could reduce their maximum risk by diversifying more evenly across those loans. The benefit to Saving Stream is that my investment is limited by the maximum I am prepared to risk against each loan so improving diversity across loans will mean I put more of my P2P money on Saving Stream. As the voting shows that only two other lenders have seen the light I will retreat gracefully and shut up.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 10, 2016 16:05:17 GMT
The reason you can't buy the loans you want on the SM is because we are all after them. Improved platform software cannot remove that problem but it can lessen the impact of that problem on lenders by: - reducing the time wasted fruitlessly trying to buy non-available loans. - avoiding the need to keep an idle cash buffer or gamble on resolving INPL loans in time.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 10, 2016 14:09:51 GMT
As others have said, I can't see the value of this - to SS or too lenders who can buy sell on the SM as now. It would add unneeded complexity to the site - and even if the FCA didn't object using such a system would be against the ISA rules which I presume meeting is a higher priority for SS. The value to SS is that some lenders would be able to increase their lending if they could reduce the risk by spreading their loans more evenly. The value to lenders arises because we cannot buy and sell on the SM right now. Today I have been monitoring the SM all day and have managed to make only two trades in the loans I want totalling less than 1% of my unfilled targets. The SM is always either in feast or famine, so trying to diversify with the current SM is always a challenge. It also requires either keeping a cash buffer that is not earning or using INPL and hoping to sell loans before SS take umbrage. It is also prohibitively time consuming. I can see no reason for the FCA to object or for a problem with the ISA rules if SS added a loan swapping market. Swaps at arms length through an open market should present a level playing field. The additional complexity should be minimised by careful design of the user interface so that it would effectively be hidden from users who just wanted to buy or sell loans.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 10, 2016 12:35:27 GMT
ablrateandy Does Ablrate hide the performance of its historic loans and non-tradable loans or am I looking in the wrong place? Would you be happy to share at least summary performance information such as: - volume of loans that have repaid on time;
- volume of loans that have repaid late, have overdue repayments, have renegotiated repayment terms, or have been extended?
Some re-assurance about how much is hidden might be timely in view of the secret discussion around the containers loan. The largest P2P lenders publish their loan books. Thank you
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 9, 2016 15:55:54 GMT
Previous updates were talking about selling only the Scottish land for circa £5m. There are two possible interpretations of the latest updates: a) the borrower has agreed an option to sell both the Scottish and the Welsh land together for a total of £6,000,000. b) the borrower has agreed an option to sell only the Scottish land for £6,000,000. Interesting point, personally I think its b) as the original plan for the Welsh land was land banking while a neighbouring site was developed. Might be worth cross-posting this into the relevant threads. Good point ilmoro . I have added the update and explained the ambiguity in the PBL055 thread. So hopefully any further discussion on the PBL055 update can be in that thread, here: p2pindependentforum.com/post/127447/threadIt is a lot easier to keep our discussions in the correct threads now that cooling_dude maintains an index to the thread for each loan.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 9, 2016 15:44:05 GMT
The Saving Stream update on 8 July 2016 says: "Borrower has agreed a sale for £6,000,000. On an option agreement for 12 months. The buyer will pay Saving Stream interest quarterly in advance for up to 12 months". The same update was posted for PBL057 - Land with planning - Scotland.
Previous updates were talking about selling only the Scottish land for circa £5m. There are two possible interpretations of the latest updates: a) the borrower has agreed an option to sell both the Scottish and the Welsh land together for a total of £6,000,000. b) the borrower has agreed an option to sell only the Scottish land for £6,000,000.
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