Add P2P Lending News To Your Website

Apparently this has ability has been built into wordpress for quite some time but a friend of mine recently pointed up that it can be done (pfblogs popular posts added to sidebar.) Here is the wordpress codex for this feature: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/fetch_rss.

To add the p2p lending news to my sidebar I added the following to my theme…

<h3>P2P Lending News</h3>
<?php // Get RSS Feed(s)
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . ‘/rss.php’);
$rss = fetch_rss(‘http://www.p2pnobank.com/feed’);
$maxitems = 10;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $maxitems);
?>

<ul>
<?php if (empty($items)) echo ‘<li>No items</li>’;
else
foreach ( $items as $item ) : ?>
<li><a href=’<?php echo $item[‘link’]; ?>‘
title=’<?php echo $item[‘title’]; ?>‘>
<?php echo $item[‘title’]; ?>
</a> (<?php echo $item[‘dc’][‘creator’]; ?>)</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

No Comments | May 11, 2008 | Filed Under Features | Leave a Comment

RateLadder Loan And Portfolio Plan Power

My Prosper Listing has 1 day left in the auction. I reached 100% funding late afternoon last Wednesday. Today is the final day to bid on my loan request. Short of an Act of God this loan is as safe as they come.

My listing fell into the the conservative portfolio plan standing order #2 whose criteria is AA, not automatic funding, 0 current delinquencies, 0-1 inquiries in last 6 months, loan amount >= $10,000, debt to income ratio <= 40%, and 0 public records in the last 10 years. The plan will bid a rate of 10.5% on loans matching the criteria for lenders with cash and other portfolio balancing considerations.

My loan was 100% funded an my rate was bid down to 10.5% in ~ 4 full days. So the portfolio plan had 4 full days in which to add unique bidders onto my loan. Many bids and for what amount were placed by the portfolio plans?

It is impossible to say precisely, but I can tell you how many people bid at 10.5% and I think it is fair to say 90% (maybe more) where from the conservative portfolio plan. In total, I had 193 bids for a total amount of $12,872.87 (~$67 per bid). If 90% of those were from Portfolio Plan bids then 174 bids for $11,658 dollars were from Portfolio Plans. That is a lot of lending and pricing power. (For a full chart of all the bids on my listing grouped by rate bid as of last night please see below.)

$25 Bonus For New Lenders
How to Use Prosper Listing Widget for MySpace, Blog, Website, or Other

I used this code on ProProsper to obtain the data for my listing
select b.MinimumRate as 'Rate Bid', count(b.[key]) as 'Number of Bids', sum(b.amount) as 'Amount Bid' from listing l inner join bid b on b.listingkey=l.[key] where listingnumber=272047 group by b.MinimumRate order by count(b.[key]) desc

Rate Bid	Number of Bids	Amount Bid
null	196	24096.4700
0.105	193	12872.8700
0.1223	19	1356.5900
0.11	15	1062.9300
0.12	13	1250.0000
0.115	4	201.3700
0.1045	4	525.0000
0.104	3	151.6200
0.1102	3	1200.0000
0.1202	3	450.0000
0.1125	3	226.6200
0.1035	2	249.2900
0.119	2	510.0000
0.1105	2	101.6200
0.111	2	100.0000
0.1025	2	250.0000
0.103	1	50.0000
0.1033	1	100.0000
0.1042	1	50.0000
0.1049	1	50.0000
0.1111	1	50.0000
0.1075	1	50.0000
0.1077	1	80.0000
0.109	1	50.0000
0.1193	1	65.0200
0.1195	1	50.0000
0.1199	1	50.0000
0.1169	1	50.0000
0.1175	1	100.0000
0.1185	1	50.0000
0.1149	1	500.0000
0.1207	1	50.0000
0.121	1	50.0000
0.1213	1	200.0000
0.122	1	50.0000

1 Comment | February 5, 2008 | Filed Under Features, Listing Review, Prosper.com, Statistics, Strategy, Tools | 1 Comment

Lending Club Stats

If you want to try Lending Club be sure to sign up with this link to receive $25 bonus.

Until now LendingClub has lacked a customer friendly loan and listing statistics site. Sure you could sql query the data at ProProsper (select * from lendingclubloanstats), even though it is powerful it lacks consumer friendliness and a certain pizazz.

Introducing LendingClubStats by Eric of the rightfully famous and successful Eric’s Community Credit. Awesome job Eric!

Loans by Status, Credit, and Amount
Loan Growth
A Listing search although still not all the data that is displayed

Lending Club, More Data Please!

LC Loan Gowth

5 Comments | January 29, 2008 | Filed Under Features, Lending Club, Site Review | 5 Comments

Lending Club Bonus, Higher Interest Rates, and Website Updates

Over the weekend Lending Club updated their website and raised the base interest rate 25 basis points. They have an incredible 5% bonus if you lend $5000 or more by February 3rd and a $25 bonus for new members that signup using this link.

I like the new account summary screen VERY much.

Lending Club Account Summary

I was very hopeful that this upgrade was going to minimally fulfill my request for a complete advanced filter and a lender statement and as a stretch had hoped it would have continuous lending match with a complete advanced filter. While the changes are extensive they fall a short of my hopes.

The advanced search options are not complete. I was not able to filter on 2 of the fields I use to determine whether to extend credit: inquires in the last 6 months (I want values of 0-1, but occasionally go up to 2) and bankcard utilization (what I really want is for the person that uses their credit and has more available credit than they are requesting, but at Prosper I settle for a filter of 3-80%). Without these filter options, I still need to manually browse each and every loan to determine their extended credit. I do like the delinquencies in the last 2 years filter (I set it to zero). After going through a page and half of searched loans in reverse APR order I found 1 loan and called off my hunt to put the remaining $375 (rounded $25 increments of $386.07). I will wait until I accumulate $500 via referrals and interest and try the lending match, hopefully there is an extended credit filter of at least what is available via search.

Lastly, I still do not see a way to determine when the payments (principal, interest, and fees) were paid into my account. I assume they will have to solve this for tax accounting, but I hope they include it in interface. I would like to track my Lending Club loans in Quicken with the same manner as my Prosper loans in Quicken.

Overall a solid upgrade, but it still leaves me wanting more. I am sure they will continue to make improvements and they have an incredible 5% bonus if you lend $5000 or more by February 3rd and a $25 bonus for new members that signup using this link so if you are considering trying Lending Club now is as good a time as any.

17 Comments | January 22, 2008 | Filed Under Features, Lending Club | 17 Comments