Entries from October 2007 ↓
October 21st, 2007 — Prosper.com, Quicken, Statistics, Strategy, Tools
It took a little tinkering, but I finally hit upon the perfect way to integrate Prosper (or LendingClub or …) with Quicken (or Money or …) given the current lack of integration between the services (see here if interested.)
Since implementing that solution I have had defaulted debt sold.
With enough experience behind me I thought that a comparison of the Quicken and Prosper accounting differences and the implication on ROI.
Quicken enters the money into the account the moment the money leaves my bank account and it only acknowledges interest after it has been paid. Prosper only counts money in loans and acknowledges interest the moment it is accrued. Both acknowledge default sale amounts the moment they happen. Neither approach attempt to project a future loan’s value.
What does this mean? Well it means that with Quicken you can get the ROI for the moment the money enters the account with interest only for actual payments received. With Prosper you get the ROI for the loans with all accrued interest. Since you can only deduct defaulted principal (cash basis) I feel that Quicken’s approach is correct.
That being said let’s compare ROI values for my account… Other than the gap the curves are remarkably similar. I am interested to see what the rumored December debt sale looks like.
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October 20th, 2007 — Site Statistics
October 19th, 2007 — Globe Funder, Kiva, Lending Club, Loanio, MicroPlace, P2P Lending Forums, Prosper.com, Zopa
What opinions do you guys have on how the sub-prime mortgage meltdown will affect peer to peer lending? I’ll confess I’m still spooked at the moment and working to draw down my balance at Prosper. From things I’ve been reading, it would appear that the worst is still yet to come, what with a large chunk of ARM borrowers set to reset between now and mid 2008. What do you guys think? Will p2p lending suffer when a lot of these people default?
This was posted by Jimmy211 at the P2P No Bank Forum… here is a link: Sub-Prime Mortgage Meltdown
RateLadder responded with
I have read 2 schools of thought. 1 is that it will as you are saying. The other is that people do everything possible to cut a deal with their mortgage provider and protect their consumer credit.
As an unsecured loan we are last in line in bankruptcy and that is why loan rates are higher on unsecured loans.
Personally I have always been chasing the highest rates. But I have recently be focusing on the cleanest of the clean credit (flight to quality.)
What do you think? Come join the discussion at the P2P No Bank Forum!
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October 17th, 2007 — Listing Review, Prosper.com
Welcome to the second installment of Pimp my Listing. I was in the previous loan by these entropenours. That loan was paid as expected.
I placed $50 bids @ 14.94, 15.94, 16.94, and 17.94.
This is a super clean C requesting $25K @ 29%.
$25 Bonus For New Lenders
How to Use Prosper Listing Widget for MySpace, Blog, Website, or Other
Purpose of loan:
Banana Books, LLC has maintained a wonderful working relationship with Prosper Lending. We have successfully used Prosper in the past to finance our working capital needs. The proceeds of this loan will go to acquire inventory (COGS) at the end of the current academic semester (December). We will then quickly turn around and sell this inventory in January.
My financial situation:
Historically, Banana Books has earned a 62% gross margin and 35% net income. We are very keen on mitigating fixed costs and overhead. Almost every (90%) expense is variable.
FINANCIAL OBJECTIVES
Banana Books seeks to use Prosper Lending to augment existing bank credit lines and private equity.
The $25,000 from Prosper will be used as Working Capital to acquire COGS
Banana Books will be able to sell the books for $256,278.24 in net sales in January.
All notes will be fully repaid shortly thereafter.
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October 16th, 2007 — Lending Club
An penny sized accounting irregularity with Lending Club accounting was brought to my attention by HollowOak at MoneyWalks — LendingClub - all those pennies are adding up. Today, I received an email from Patrick Gannon Senior Vice President at Lending Club addressing the issue (subject = Lender notification - fractional penny rounding).
Dear Lender,
We are contacting you to let you know about an important update to your account functionality on the Lending Club website. Our team has completed a series of improvements to payment handling that will change some of the numbers you see in your account. One of the interesting challenges we face in a p2p lending marketplace is the many-to-many matching of borrowers to lenders and the impact that has on payment amounts. Each borrower makes a single payment on a loan, which is divided across the lender accounts that funded the loan. This leads to penny-rounding issues that several of you have told us about, and which we are now addressing.
Lenders will see updates to their expected payments. They will now vary by up to $0.01 in either direction for each loan in a portfolio to account for the consistent rounding. The final payment will be a balloon payment to clear out any remaining fractions of pennies, so you should expect that final loan payments in your portfolios will be slightly different from the previous payments. Actual payments to date will also be adjusted, but only if the lender should have received a few additional cents on their payments to date. No lender account will have actual payments adjusted downwards. In total, the net impact across all loans and lenders to date is less than $26.
Please log into your account to view your updated account summary.
We want Lending Club to be a transparent environment, and we will notify you in the future if any other issues impact your experience as a lender. Please feel free to contact me directly with any questions about this change or lending at Lending Club.
Sincerely,
Patrick Gannon
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October 16th, 2007 — Groups, Prosper.com, Statistics
On a thread in the forum it was revealed for the first time that I am aware of that the earliest pre launch special invite group leaders were compensated with stock (see here).
I used ProProsper to identify these groups. I am unsure of the exact cutoff date so I am publishing all groups started on or before 2/16/2006. Some of these groups have a GL that is a known employee (jwitchel for example); regardless I left the list intact. I obtained this list by using data freely available in the public data export through. Specifically I used the grid export to csv file of ProProsper after ordering the group grid by the “Group Since” column.
(This spreadsheet is also available here)
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October 12th, 2007 — politics
Al Gore should be the president of the United States. He is a visionary and a leader. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for championing the must import cause in the world today: global warming. His movie An Inconvenient Truth
brought unprecedented attention to this cause.
In order to further the goal of persuading Al Gore to be the next president of the United states I started a Facebook cause Draft Al Gore. Any proceeds raised are being donated to the Al and Tipper Gore Foundation. Let our voice be heard join the facebook cause.
We are saying loud and clear, “Al Gore please run for and be the next president of the United States.”
I was inspired by Draft Gore.
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October 11th, 2007 — Prosper.com, Statistics, Strategy
I have been tracking the Prosper lender HollowOak for a while. Initially, it was because when I first started RateLadder he had just started a Prosper Blog as well Money Walks. While he started strong blogging his post frequency has quickly diminished. He is latest infrequent posts are on his Lending Club experience. He has several quality posts and his blog is worth a read, however that is not the point of this post…
His Prosper portfolio is in phenomenal shape. Here are some basic stats…
Total Loans: 152
Weighted Average Loan Age: 227
Weighted Average Credit Grade: C
Weighted Average Interest Rate: 14.99%
Experian ROI: 9.22%
Lending Stats ROI: 11.97%
Eric’s CC ROI: 11.81%
He has a bell curve distribution across all credit grades.
He has 2 late loans (1 month or more late) and 2 defaulted loans.
I think he might be the only lender I know of with the following property… Experian ROI < Eric’s CC ROI < Lending Stats ROI. Usually these stats are in the opposite order.
He seems to be rolling over money as opposed to adding more.
Great Job HollowOak!!! Now if you would just blog more. 
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October 9th, 2007 — Features, Prosper.com
From “Prosper Jon”… (I am on Facebook and I am using this application.)
—-
We recently launched a beta Facebook application called “Prosper”. This is one of the upcoming features alluded to by Andrew in his Sep 12 site update announcement.
As some of you know, we’ve experimented with the Facebook Platform in the past by developing a game called Fantasy Banker.
This application isn’t a game, but a more directed effort to bridge Facebook and the Prosper marketplace.
By integrating Prosper with your social graph, you can make the marketplace even better and social lending more social.
The application also allows you to share your Prosper activity with your Facebook network, even if they aren’t already Prosper users. Once you’ve added the application, simply using Prosper can inform your friends about loan requests you’ve made, or bids you’ve placed. Here’s an example of what the stories look like when they show up in Facebook’s news feed:
If you’re a Facebook member you can check it out:
Try Prosper on Facebook now>
Learn more about Prosper on Facebook>
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October 9th, 2007 — Features, Prosper.com, Statistics
San Francisco – October 9, 2007 – Prosper (www.prosper.com), America’s largest people-to-people lending marketplace, today released its September People-to-People Lending Market Survey. Prosper’s People-to-People Lending Market Survey provides key statistics and a market commentary by Chris Larsen, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Prosper.
Prosper’s People-to-People Lending Market Survey is released on the second Tuesday of every month. To register to automatically receive the survey, send an email with “SUBSCRIBE” in the subject line to: p2plendingmarketsurvey@prosper.com.
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