Posting this to take the opportunity to whine and also see if others have seen anything similar.
Background; my portfolio's weighted average age was maybe 15 months this past January and is approaching 18 months now.
Perhaps 90%+ of the loans are D's and E's, and all are 36 month. I have 4000 - 5000 active notes (not fully paid or charged off).
Got my Nov statement today and the past two are my worst by far.
Simply taking the numbers from the 2015 monthly statements and computing charge offs as a percent of principal invested and as a percent of interest received I came up with the following (easy stuff; no NAR, IRR, XIRR, etc.):
Stmt Start Charged Off Charged Off
Date as a % as a %
of Interest of Principal
------------- ------------- -------------
01/01/2015 50.24% 0.66%
02/01/2015 31.27% 0.38%
03/01/2015 48.74% 0.69%
04/01/2015 40.07% 0.56%
05/01/2015 31.68% 0.41%
06/01/2015 46.76% 0.61%
07/01/2015 27.51% 0.39%
08/01/2015 48.92% 0.59%
09/01/2015 41.55% 0.52%
10/01/2015 61.86% 0.84% ****
11/01/2015 75.24% 0.92% ********
Simple Average 45.80% 0.60%
Yep that's right fans. This months score was 75% of my interest covered charge offs and I got to keep 25% for myself.
My average weighted portfolio age is way past the peak of the charge offs curve, so I don't understand what's going on.
Maybe I should just consider myself lucky that I at least made a profit.
There's been a lot of dissing of LC's ANAR, but it did warn me things were going south fast. It dropped almost a full % the past 2 months.
Now I'm going to have a beer (and cry in it).
Ouch. That is a pretty large jump. I'd be curious if you notice anything similar about them. All from a similar month, etc. The holidays has had me wondering what effect it has on both existing loans and loans issued this month in the future. I just haven't had time to attempt to research it. At 4.9 month average duration I'm still too new to cry over too many charge offs yet. My only advice is have 5 beers.
Yep, you are near the tipping point.
It will be rare for you to have negative monthly portfolio return with these loans unless you stopped lending cash in the account.
Hi Rob,
I have over 5000 notes invested and my Lending Club results have recently been poor. Mostly C,D and E notes. Can I ask you what is your current adjusted net annualized return? You may be about 8-10% now, but the only way to keep your return high is to keep plunging more cash in. If you stopped investing for a while, the losses would start to snowball.
If you look at the 'Understanding Your Returns' chart, the interest rate falls very far over time. Once your portfolio is over 18-24 months, the returns really start slipping to between 6-8% and with the tax consequences of so many write-offs you may even have a negative return.
My account and that of my family has shown increased distress in the last quarter.
Ah... professional victimhood. Ok, you don't want to learn - you want someone to blame, besides yourself.
Moving on...
[/quote]
Yes, please move on. I am trying to honestly help the OP and give information about my experience with LC. I'm really confused by what the motivation is to insult me, but please stay out of this discussion. You haven't added anything to the topic except for trying to silence me. I am just offering Rob my honest experience and warning him about what is in store.
Based on RaymondG, Bryce, Lascott and me there does seem to have been a surge of charge offs the past couple of months.
Nonattender suggested seasonality. Maybe. Trouble in the oil patch? That's been discussed. Other theories?
Once again I am very surprised at the volatility here. Something that simply owning a lot of notes doesn't ameliorate.
I wouldn't sweat it. I have had poor months and great months (just coming off a great one, FYI). and there is a certain "luck of the draw" all of the time. Keep in mind that I invest electronically through the API, so there are "no poor choices" made manually in my investments. The software looks at the filters and model and makes the choices. As a result, I can say that these things do occur as a part of the random selection, but let's face it. Investing in LC notes is for the long haul. Anybody that invests $1000 in hopes of having an extra $100 a year later and not reinvesting it would have to be crazy. The real return is in compounding your returns. Have a glass of holiday cheer and let it ride. I've been in for 5 years now - very happy with my returns.
In 2015, three months with highest charge offs
October | 0.4429% |
January | 0.4376% |
September | 0.4327% |
For All Lending Club loans issued between June 2007 and Sept 2015,
Three months with highest charge offs
October | 0.4163% |
March | 0.4078% |
January | 0.4076% |
Three months with lowest charge offs
June | 0.3617% |
May | 0.3566% |
November | 0.3561% |
Reading all of this prompted me to at least look at last month, November. Charge offs reported on the LC statement + sale losses (of graces) as reported by Interest Radar add up to a simple 40% of interest earned. That's a hefty investment fee.
F & G grade charge offs seems to have taken off since May this year. Overall 2015 charge-offs are within the median +/- 95% CI for past 8 years on annual basis. The charge offs bottomed out in 2012 and have been rising since then. We are back to 2010 level in 2015.
January, March, October and December tend to be outside median +/- 95% CI on monthly basis.
Are many of you guys involved in watching the credit markets? There has been signs of weakness. Of course there is consumer weakness in some parts of Texas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, etc. But the fall in oil combined with the rising dollar is really pressuring the industrial economy -- some are claiming we are in an industrial recession. And then the leveraged loan market recently seemed to freeze briefly before the banks had to make concessions to get the deals done. Weakness in the securitization market. Etc. I just think there are some credit cracks starting to show.
And like I've said many times on this forum, people need to realize where we are at in the consumer cycle. Things are not going to get much better from here, only worse. I've been recently cleaning my account out of high grade notes I suspect have weakness due to their locations and job titles in anticipation of these credit trends that started a few months ago.
Peter had a post recently about eREIT, link:
http://www.lendacademy.com/fundrise-launches-first-ever-ereit-to-invest-in-commercial-real-estate/. Is anyone going to try it? I signed up but I do not know when it's available to me. It would most likely have much less charge-offs. The chargeoff rates published by Federal Reserve:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/chargeoff/chgallsa.htm
I think that most people have experienced lower returns over the last quarter, but I do not think it is an issue just with the last quarter.
I think the biggest reason for the decreasing returns is a result of LC lowering interest rates at least 3-4 times in the last 18 months. It is really hard to maintain our current risk appetite, not modify our filters and expect to maintain our old returns. We take the same risk for a lower average interest rate, it is simple math.
I also think supply has severely decreased over the last 12-18 months (at least for my filters). 2-3 years ago I was able to reinvest payments + $20k of new cash a month at $25 per loan without an issue. I have been forced to expand my filter criteria as well as my per loan investment. I now take more risk at a lower interest rate than I would have received had I taken that level of risk in the past. What I am finding is I am investing an increasing % of funds at a lower interest rate to simply get funds invested.
I am not saying cash drag is a result of decreased returns, I am simply not adding the level of new funds to the account that I would have in the past. As we all know, the returns are higher on "younger" funds, so the less "younger" funds and the increase in "aged" funds results in lower returns as well.
I am sure some will disagree, but I have a different strategy/objective than most. I am not worried about investing $10-20k and making 15%. My strategy needs to be able to invest $30k+ a month and maintain a consistent return. My personal IRA account has under $30k in it and makes 11.3%, but this account only gets $5.5k a year of new funds and I do not care if it takes 2 months to invest that $5.5k. So waiting for the right higher interest rate loans is easy. Dealing with accounts that have over $25k of monthly payments is a different beast.
I could go on forever, but will leave it at that. I think P2P provides great returns compared to all other fixed income style investments. Yes returns are going down, but I do believe just in the last 2 weeks or so, LC actually increased rates on some loans.
I agree with CircleT, but it's just a function of credit in general. It's going to be virtually impossible to get the pricing right. Loans always have these same trends, whether it is banks or other entities. A crisis happens and underwriting tightens, returns increase but growth slows. Then in an attempt to grow, competition comes in and underwriting loosens to achieve the growth and maintain returns. Then economy has a hiccup and the loose underwriting results in credit costs (more for some than others). Then it tightens back up. It's just the way credit works and I don't see a reason to think this will ever change, it is just human nature. We are in the loosening phase and compared to history, this phase is lasting a very long time without hiccups. Some think the hiccup is coming now, but I have no clue other than I know it'll seem obvious after the fact.
I don't mean the above to criticize LC or suggest they are doing something wrong. It's just I hope people who don't spend much time around other forms of lending understand this dynamic. Hopefully things don't get as loose as they did in 2008, but they will get loose. Just like it happened in oil -- some people started waving certain parts of the a typical structure and are not feeling the pain from those choices. But you have to bend some to compete or you may not be able to grow enough.
The above is why every strategy I use, I also test that strategy starting in 2007 and seeing how the loans performed when the recession hit. It's important to not just know the expected return, but how wide the range of possible outcomes are.
Things don't seem to be going better. Lost another 6 ANAR basis points just today.
Meanwhile my "blue dot" (not earth from space, the other one) is near top of the class.
I feel like the week or two after a holiday anar is always goofy. Mine is down the last two days and I haven't had any more loans drop a status.
So I wondered if LC has begun charging off loans more quickly.
These data are almost all of my charge offs (about 460 of them), not a map of Florida. A few of my charge offs do not have a loan status date and were omitted.
Charge offs do seem to be happening more quickly after last payment. I cannot rule out some natural cause and have not looked closely at the results.
Here is one loan from the chart very recently charged off:
https://www.lendingclub.com/account/loanPerf.action?loan_id=12816075&order_id=19011062¬e_id=42543100
Days OVERDUE would be more meaningful I think than days from the last payment (which may not have brought the loan back to current).
hey I was just looking at my charged off amount and compared with the individual loans that were charged off and it looks wrong.
Can other people compare the actual charged off amount for the month with the individual loans that were charged off (remaining principal)?
thanks!
thanks!
For me, the charged off amount in "Understanding Your Traded Note Returns" differs from "my notes at a glance".
I did an analysis last week of recoveries as a percent of amount invested for each of my 512 charged off notes.
These are predominantly D & E notes starting mid 2013 and continuing to date (8100 notes issued).
Amount Recovered Number of notes
21% - 100% 18
14% - 20% 36
13% - 9% 176
8% - 1% 16
0% 266
Recoveries are only a part of the picture.
Obviously payments made before the charge offs significantly mitigate the total losses.
With notes sorted in order of decreasing loss as a % of note principal:
Cumulative Total Loss Number of notes (and % of total number of notes)
11% 64 (12.5%)
21% 128 (25%)
38% 256 (50%)
50% 384 (75%)
58% 512 (100%)
For D & E loans 58% may be a good estimate of average loss given default.
Sound reasonable?
January was a crazy month for not only the number of notes but evenness of the grades. I bought a bunch ... but as they cycle goes a lot of those are coming back out (borrower decided not to get loan, didn't supply all doc, etc reasons).
Image:
http://i.imgur.com/u6Z0JJr.png
Mentions of "Worst Month Ever" in November were just a prelude of things to come.
Got my January statement today. At least it's not a loss (yet).
I attempted to make a chart of Chargoffs / InterestReceived, but the numbers came out small, due to the fact that my I have been making deposits during 2015. You start getting interest when a loan is 1 month old, but you don't start getting chargeoffs until a loan is 5 months old, so there's a skew, and the denominators included interest on loans which could not possibly charge off. So I modified the spreadsheet, adding a 4 month skew. The numerator is chargeoffs in the current month. The denominator is interest received FOUR MONTHS AGO.
I don't see a trend here. I see random variations around 25%, which is same as it ever was.
This of course applies to my account, given my loan selection criteria, and may not apply to others.
I wasn't making deposits in the fall, so the skew won't apply to my account. Jan was my worst by far at 45%.
I've had a backlog from the fall of loans sitting in the Late 31-120+ bucket. That started working off last month and will continue, probably into March. I haven't seen any new loans fall into that category since late Dec. and the 16-30 day bucket has it's normal handful.
I thought I was going to have my first ever no payments made default. Had one sitting in 31-120, but they suddenly caught the loan up and made it current.
I've got a smallish portfolio, so this is purely anecdotal.
Note that the distribution on loan grades in the account has no material change since 1/2013. The low bars in mid 2014 are partly due to 20% new money injected in to my LC account. The trend line is MVA of 6 periods. The loss is adjusted with lates, defaults, and loss from selling on folio.
It's interesting to keep things in perspective.
When I bought my first note on 5/17/2013 the S&P 500 (SPY ETF) was 157.95 (adjusted back for dividends).
This past Friday's SPY close was 187.95. A gain of 18.99%. My LC account as of today has gained 26.86%.
SPY would have to be at 200.37 for its gains to equal my LC gains.
I know it's apples to oranges but by comparison LC isn't looking too bad right now despite my recent setbacks.
I thought I have some pretty bad months in 2014 and 2015. Most of my notes are D since late of 2014 – doesn't making any differences even when I had lots of A, B and C notes in the early years (2010 to 2014). The 278.13 default in April 2014 were mostly from B notes, and some were over 15 months.
And so it goes:
It's not just my new loans that are flaking out, it's pretty much across the board. I started with LC in 5/13.
I'm not adding cash exponentially to my portfolio, but I am reinvesting principal and interest. No deposits since 2014.
Charge offs haven't flattened out at 12-14 months.
That seems to be my big problem. It's not simply that new loans are being quickly charged off.
Not giving up though; still trying to stay fully invested. The new interest rates are definitely helping in that regard.
Still could be simply a run of bad luck. It happens.
PS: Trend lines there to make Fred93 happy.
A simple read of Rob's data - for the latest 4 bad month:
Jan 15: most bad loans from Jul~Aug 14 (As average charge-off age 16~17 months)
Dec 14: most bad loans from May~Jun 14 (As average charge-off age 18~19 months)
Nov 14: most bad loans from Jul~Aug 14 (As average charge-off age 15~16 months)
Oct 14: most bad loans from May~Jun 14 (As average charge-off age 16~17 months)
Looks likely there's loan quality control issue with LC during May to Aug 2014? Not sure whether this analysis is correct.
Just got this e-mail from Prosper. Sorry the tables in the e-mail wouldn't copy. Maybe somebody else can post them?
QUOTE
Effective today, Prosper has increased its estimated loss rates and the price charged for risk on the loans originated through the platform. We believe this move ensures that our borrower payment dependent note and whole loan products remain competitive for our investors in the current turbulent market environment that we have witnessed since the beginning of 2016. Since August of 2015, Prosper has been proactively raising the estimated loss rates and the price for risk in the loan products originated through the platform. We believe that these proactive moves will ensure that we continue to offer superior products to our investors.
Below, please find the new pricing table and the estimated portfolio impact of the changes (changes are based on a simulation of the new policies on January booked loans and actual portfolio composition will vary depending on how new applicants respond to offers and the relative marketing mix going forward vs. January):
Estimated Aggregate Impact to Prosper Portfolio of Loss and Price Changes:
Sorry Table Wouldn't Copy
Proposed Pricing Modifications for the Week of 2/15:
Sorry Table Wouldn't Copy
UNQUOTE
The data below is for both myself and my daughter who both have Prosper accounts and use similar "conservative" loan selection criteria.
Two of which are "Debt Consolation Only" and to "never lend to anyone who has ever had a delinquency".
I have 50% B's, 25% A's and 25% C's. She has about equal number of B's and C's.
I have a charge off "spike" in Nov, Dec and Jan 16 and she doesn't?
Edit: We both have the same 13 month average charge off as % of Interest of 44%.
Daughter Charge Off Dad Charge Off
as % of Interest as % of Interest
Jan '16 45% Jan '16 74%
Dec '15 58% Dec '15 83%
Nov 63% Nov 86%
Oct 60% Oct 43%
Sept 72% Sept 26%
Aug 64% Aug 63%
July 26% July 9%
June 29% June 19%
May 53% May 44%
Apr 28% Apr 19%
Mar 50% Mar 74%
Feb 14% Feb 11%
Jan '15 20% Jan '15 24%
Ave 44% 44%
Not sure of how many notes you have but it appears random. There are months were hers is higher.
Oddly it evens out with 44% (average).
Re: I have 50% B's, 25% A's and 25% C's. She has about equal number of B's and C's.
Given you both have about 50% Bs ... perhaps you have more C's defaulting but less A's. Still this is too general just to go on grades.
Reformated with "code" tag and courier font
(code)
Thanks lascott!
I was just going to ask for help with that post formatting.
Could you please explain what the "code tag" is?
Is it one of those small buttons above?
TIA
Similar to what I observed in my account. The number bounces all around, but doesn't fit the "worst month yet - things are going to hell" hypothesis.
=================================================================================================
I think it is great that you both have the common interest and she likes being a little ahead of dad. Good stuff.
You have quite a few notes for a great diversification.
Have you considered using LendingRobot and doing custom rules (filters) similar to what you like? You can also use their "expected return" rule which is like their "credit model" to help you pick notes and then add on some other criteria that you feel strongly about. Often "credit models" take into account a lot of relationships between criteria (i.e. if public records > 0 but occured a long time ago then still "ok").
You can use my referral link in my signature line (extra $5K for each of us of investing) or simple go directly to their site. No big deal either way to me. (I was a computer operator as a college job using punch cards
)
[/quote]
=================================================================================================
LA Scott,
First, the only P2P accounts my family has are Prosper. I was watching them for a few years and after Prosper 1.0 crashed and burned and after the Great Recession I worked up the nerve to open an account in the fall of 2012. The Fed's ZIRP was a big motivator. In hind sight I might have been better off with Lending Club but it is what it is.
I was very excited when Bryce Mason showed up with P2P in 2013(?) but it took forever for him to get around to Prosper and I lost interest. I recently noted he has moved on.
Lately I have been encouraged by the consolidation to only FOUR third party tools space for retail investors. I like to let "natural selection" work and let the "market" reduce my number of options. Assuming the strong survive.
NSR Invest
LendingRobot
BlueVestment
PeerCube
http://www.lendacademy.com/the-state-of-the-retail-investor-in-p2p-lending/Recently I have looked at Lending Robot and went so far in their registration process to get on their "mailing list". I was thinking of opening one of their small accounts (Less $5k) with the intent of running a trial.
Since Lending Robot is here in the Emerald City I also plotted their offices on Google Maps with the intention of making an unannounced visit when I was in the neighborhood.
I remember
when doing DD on Prosper trying to penetrate their facility in SFran only to be rebuffed. But I did manage to ambush a woman employee in the elevator and got lots of good info. LOL
Last week I did click on all the links in your signature line and looked around.
I was considering starting a sting here with the intent of trying to collect the pros and cons of each of the remaining four providers. Does anyone know if that thread already exists? I have never seen it.
SeattleSun
I calculate XIRR annually and YTD for current years. Last year was my lowest year ever and YTD this year is lower than my last year's full year.
Lending Club and Prosper Interest Rates, Loss Curves and Loan PerformanceWith recent interest rate changes and economic uncertainty, we look at the latest Lending Club and Prosper loss curves.
FEBRUARY 22, 2016 BY RYAN LICHTENWALD
http://www.lendacademy.com/lending-club-and-prosper-interest-rates-loss-curves-and-loan-performance/
Hi Rob,
6 months ago when you originally posted, i suggested that Lending Club D and E notes were not good investments. I thought LC over-inflated the expected returns on these notes on the 'view order' page last year.
I stopped investing 18 months ago and for the past 6 months my charge offs continue to be about 100% of my interest with some months over 100%. My ANAR was 8% 6 months ago and is now at 7% and continues to go lower. there is some very scary snaking downward in the 'Understanding Your Returns' chart that suggests more recent notes might be performing much worse than notes from a couple years ago.
Thanks for keeping this thread updated and it will be interesting to see what your results are now that you stopped buying new notes. Can you include the 'weighted average age of your portfolio' when you next post.
I'll post whatever happens. My weighted average is Interest rate 17.34% and ANAR is at 9.40%.
Weighted average age is 20.4 months so it's getting a bit long in the tooth.
In 2015, I was at 27% Charge off as Interest. This year, I am at 65%. With average age of 15.8 months and still reinvesting, this is a very interesting way to look at the account.
My ANAR is still at 11% but based on these numbers, that will probably change in the near future. The thought of, am I skewing my own returns because I keep on reinvesting popped back into my head again. Hmm...
My May charge offs as % of interest were 23.5%. Were it not for proactive selling on Folio that would have been higher. The last three months of Folio sales have been net positive.
My concern now is that proactive selling requires deeper discounts, which may be counterproductive.
Second concern is new Graces which are occurring now, after my "pruning" phase, recover more often than before-- so I've stopped automatically selling them. This means more monitoring work.
I use PeerCube's "Alerts" and "Notes at Risk" features to help locate potential problems. Thanks, Anil!
Thanks for using PeerCube and providing feedback and suggestions for improvement.
Can you send me an email with your criteria for selling based on Alerts and Notes at Risk? I am trying to figure out if it could possibly be automated so that you don't even need to review alerts and notes at risk and then manually sell notes.
BTW, have you checked out Portfolio Statistics pages yet? These are new. I am planning to add the changes in stats with time for user portfolio, as PeerCube keeps history of your portfolio. We just haven't figured out yet how to do it fast enough to not let subscribers wait too long.
Here's my
July May charge offs as a percent of interest received. The storm seems to have passed for now.
I have begun selling on Folio but the $ amount was very small. All notes sold were young and could have not yet charged off.
However, since I stopped purchasing notes on 5/9/16 my cash is at its highest level since March 2014.
Coincidentally, I just found that statistics page about an hour ago, before reading your post! I was trying out the Primary and Sales account choices there, trying to make heads out of tails for where the whole set of one of my portfolio's original notes disappeared to. LC just shows what's left, with no way to look up what was sold. I got excited when I saw Fico trends with a Sell button for a particular portfolio!
Yes, I'll send an email about criteria. Not so sure I have anything coherent to communicate, but I'll try.
Surprisingly, but not statistically significant yet after starting my account 2 1/3 months ago w/ 53 notes and a E 9%, F 30%, G 60% distribution w/ seasoned notes from Folio I have only had one note go into grace period, which went back to current after two weeks. This should not even be possible if roughly 18% of F-G notes are charged off.
.
May charge offs were 50% and the long run remained 44%.
Prosper only lender since 2012 with 1300 active loans.
May
Taxable
ROTH
Here's the update for June; a very good month.
I stopped all purchasing on 5/9 so no investments occurred this month. My Folio selling has been only a small percentage of my portfolio value and had almost no effect on the graph shown. Charge-offs as a percent of Principal Invested (another graph I maintain) ticked up a bit as would be expected. That will get worse. Cash available as a percent of portfolio value is now about 16%.
Almost forgot: ANAR 8.85%, Weighted Average Interest Rate 17.33%, Weighted Average Age of Portfolio 21.8 months.
what's the update for July?
In my case it was about what I was expecting.
I think next month should improve some.
On 5/9 I stopped reinvesting and a month or so later started selling on Folio. All sales have been "Current" notes.
My amount invested is roughly 50% of what it was on 5/9.
This activity clearly reduced interest income, but the charge offs were already baked in.
To compensate and make the graph somewhat meaningful I used the trailing 5 months average interest for July, rather than actual interest.
.
.
There is not enough time in the day and unfortunately keeping up with this forum is what gets missed. My bad.
Will update my spreadsheet this weekend and post BUT
Just took a peak at my account which has been naturally unwinding since 1 June and the LATE numbers jumped out at me.
In June had 49 loans late out of 1250 or 3.92%
Now have 72 loans out of 1150 or 6.26%, many of these people do have a history of paying late but so far they has paid.
A fifty percent increase,
SHOULD I BE CONCERNED OR IS THIS TYPICAL VARIATION?
TIA
Am I the only one here who is still actively investing in LC?
FYI, here are my charge offs as a percentage of interest in 2016:
January 52.94%
February 55.08%
March 35.53%
April 41.70%
May 22.58%
June 25.83%
July 37.59%
No. But I've moved away from new notes as much as possible and buying solely off of Folio. With so many people heading for the exits, I can't purchase the good notes fast enough. Buying about $1k of notes each day in 2 accounts, and still running out of money by mid morning. I have zero idle cash, and am thrilled.
May jinx myself by saying that I may have finally found a strategy that works for me. Will have to wait and see how things go after all my previously purchased bad notes finally shake out. I'm in the camp that saw a lot of bad notes over the last few years and am watching while they either default,CO, or go Bankrupt. Really want them to finish up so I know how the new strategy is working.
^ - the folio strategy is probably a good one. I'm still buying new notes but only 36m for right now.
I just feel like there is so much of a "the sky is falling!!" attitude here. My returns have gone down some like most peoples but I'm still earning more than I would in my savings account.
Lending club is only a small portion of my investments (as I hope is the case for most here) - its a place to try to make at least something off the money that I don't want to put into stocks/bonds.
Well, October 2016 just went down as my first month with more charge offs than interest earned. And I get to pay tax on all of the interest but have more losses this year than I'll be able to write off against other investment capital gains. I can carry it forward, but I can't keep going with this trend. I'm moving to more conservative notes in my taxable account, but if the losses continue, I'll be reducing my account significantly. Have gone from 9-10% returns to barely holding flat this year. LC better get its act together.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Loan Status Date in October and in charged off status I assume is the same as what will be in the monthly statement? If so I am going to get hammered this month too.
I'm having a similar situation myself where I've had 4 loans go bad out of 89 active notes. One I sold in the beginning of the month which went bad in September for 90% off when it went Late 16-30 days. Another is also Late 16-30 days but went on a paymen plan, which is frustrating me since it doesn't pay until 11/30, 55 days past due. The other two are IGP but were notes I just bought off Folio, one which is hasn't paid but shows no contact log, and is in payment processing for the past eight days, so I can't sell it, the other is also on a payment plan, for three months. Luckily for me none of my notes in my seven months of investing have gone bad, luckily by selling them once they go IGP.
I have a new D2 loan that is now IGP. I'm surprised there wasn't even one payment. I don't have a good feeling the loan will ever make a payment, y'know?
Hey Rob, How is your account performing now?
When you started this thread 11 months ago, I recommended that you stop investing in LC... - that they were over-inflating returns for investors and that the charge-offs were starting to snowball. Take a look at the current 'Understanding Your Return Chart'. A year ago, it didn't show anyone with a negative return and now a lot of people have negative returns. (in the 6 month to 15 month range) and it will get worse for them as their portfolio ages.
For some reason Fred93 would not let me speak about my experience with LC and must have ulterior motives to silence any detractors. LC is failing and anyone who invested in 2014, 2015 and 2016 will soon see the staggering losses coming their way. A year from now the 'Understanding Your Returns' chart will look like a blood bath and I have a feeling LC will soon stop producing that chart or I recommend they rename it "Understanding Our Downturn"
This was also my worst month, I lost money at a rate of 5%.
LC clearly lowered lending standards after going public in an attempt to keep their loan volume growth in exponential territory, at the expense of the investors. Until they fix this, I'm done buying notes and will be withdrawing my cash as it comes in.
WOW, twice the losses of a normal month for me. And the notes.csv Charged off with a LoansStatueDate in Oct is definitely not equal to the statement's losses amount. Statement has another $150. No wonder they changed the search screens to show the principal lost to 0. It'd be nice if I could easily see which notes were charged off for a given statement.
Well, I have joined the stop buying party. Maybe I'll fire back up my folio buyer only looking for super good deals, but for now I'm done.
Just sold my stock too. I have a feeling their reports monday are going to have to include talk on increasing defaults and its noing to drop. It was only meant to be a short play anyway. Probably made more there since May than I'll make in the notes total with a whole lot less money on the line.
When did the "Understanding your returns" chart update to show so many investors below 0%?
Guys, I will admit that I have not read every post in this thread, but I am shocked to be reading that people are losing money on monthly basis.
What kind of loans are you buying that you are experiencing default/charge off rates that are greater than 10% (hard to believe anyone has average interest rate lower than 10%).
Seems to me that you are being greedy and focusing most of your investment into riskier loans. I am also thinking that those that are losing money are not investing an appropriate amount of $ to achieve the correct diversification.
The most important thing about investing in LC is diversification. But not just diversification in the number of loans you hold, but also diversification over time.
If you have $5,000, to invest you can not invest that in a 1-2 week period (even at $25 per loan) and expect solid returns. You have to spread your investment over a longer period of time and be really picky about the loans you purchase. Especially if you can not hold/buy a significant amount of loans. LC and several other sites will talk about a magic number of loans to hold to achieve diversification, to me that number is a min. of 1,000 $25 loans.
Last month was my best month ever regarding $ return. Yes, my net return has decreased from 10.xx% to 8.28% over the last 2-3 years, but it has been a very slow decline and cannot imagine losing money. I have an average interest rate of 11.49% and per LC have a Combined Return NAR of 8.28%. I know of 21 LC accounts with positive returns, lowest Combined Return NAR is 7.95%.
Maybe I am missing the bigger picture of this thread, as I have not read every post, but seems like those who are losing money are making big mistakes in how they are deploying their funds. I am not saying LC has not done things to hurt their investors, but I do not think anything they have done would cause investors to be losing money.
I do not say any of this to say I am better than anyone else or anything like that, I am just shocked people are losing money. Attached is the breakdown by grade of my portfolio.
Shutting down my reinvesting on my taxable account for a while. Will let the Roth IRA continue for a while as my performance has actually been starting to turn around there.
The understanding your returns graph is very misrepresentative of how our accounts are currently performing, since, like the "interest earned" on the login page, it goes back to day 1 of opening our accounts. I have 5 years of decent earnings that will take a lot of losses to drag down. It would be a lot more enlightening to be able to see YTD or a rolling 12 months' performance or something along those lines.
Here's my latest. In absolute terms I had my highest dollar amount charged off this month.
The past 3 months charge offs in absolute terms have been unusually high.
Decided to add the stacked bars to be able to observe what I hope to be the convergence of % charge offs back to steady state on par with my new portfolio size.
Still in the throes of having reduced my holdings by about 50% over the months of July and August. All of my Folio sales were current notes. I bought no new notes May through August then resumed purchases, reinvesting payments and resuming maintenance of a zero cash balance on what is now my downsized portfolio. Hopefully the backlog of charge offs that was already baked into my portfolio before May will have worked its way through within the next couple of months and my charge offs will settle down to a level commensurate with the my new portfolio size (blue bars and red bars about the same size). What that level might be is anyone's guess. The portfolio is about 65% D's and 35% E's, WAIR 17.38% and combined ANAR 8.08%.
Piggy backing off of what CircleT009 has said I want to say that grade and loan selection is a big determining factor of portfolio performance. I suspect that people who are saying they want to stop investing are weighted more in lower grade notes E-G, maybe even being too weighted in D, which is causing lower returns due to losses. If this is the problem then being able to optimize grade distributions, which I'm trying to do by using an efficient frontier model (If anyone has seen my post about that earlier in the week and can lend a hand that would be great.) to reduce portfolio variance.
You all must think I'm crazy to say the following but my returns have been relatively stable the past seven months when I started investing and any drop in performance is easily explained. As a warning I've only invested in Folio so my returns will be higher than others due to selecting older notes vs investing in new notes. The attached pictures show my weights for each grade as well as performance since I've started. My weights are broken down as (5.5% D), (28.1%, E), (37%, F), (29.5%, G) and steadily heading toward the higher grade notes as I get away from F-G. Over these seven months I've averaged between 18-20% returns with the only drops being from an influx of $500 for a 50% increase of funds I invested in July, and selling 1 out of my 89 notes at a 90% loss in October.
Now my question to you all is are you going to do something about to improve your returns as I assume most will as rational investors, or for the select few will you just say that everything is falling apart and there is nothing you can do to improve your situation and withdraw from Lending Club?
You bring up a point that is always on the back of my mind that we won't know until the economy reverses itself, which is why in addition to the limited supply of quality low grade notes on Folio I'm moving toward the higher grades. Now do you think that as a whole if I invested in a market portfolio of notes that my returns will be better or worse during a recession than if I invested stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs?
A few additional frustrations:
It, more so than ever, feels like LC is figuring out what it wants to be and what value it adds. Is it for retail or institutional investors? We're definitely the smaller fish, so we're getting no attention. I don't see anything changing that.
The debacle in May has caused them to lose any momentum and focus that they did have. Now they're concentrating on recovery rather than growth. Before that they were distracted with getting ready for IPO and the first quarters of being publicly traded.
Over all of that time, nothing of note has changed in our experience. The data and statistics on the logon pages don't really reflect reality as they don't allow you to look at your performance on a Month to Date or Year to Date level. Everything is based on the complete history of your account. I had hoped that would improve over time. It hasn't. And now they're distracted again.
Update for my account. Movin' on up.
My first 2 chargeoffs so guess that would qualify for the worst month yet. 4 more warming up in the bullpen so they will not get lonely. Frustrated with some of my FOLIO notes that were perfectly fine right up until I bought them now IGP. If I was more like Art Bell would say that something is up.
Do the monthly statement reflect charge offs correctly for purchased notes? Meaning reflecting the investment not principal amount?
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This month I'm back to breakeven. Trending in the right direction!
So I thought I'd chime in- been following this thread with keen interest.
I have 2 accounts- one IRA and one Taxable. My IRA account was my first LC account, and the Taxable one followed. I made the mistakes on the IRA just due to it being the first account, and having less money to put into the Taxable account during the times that everyone suspects lesser quality loans were available.
I'm dealing with two issues right now in both accounts:
1. FICO Drops- I have ~800-1300 FICO Down notes in each account- previously didn't have a good sell strategy for when these occurred other than manual processing. And for my size accounts (6-7K active notes in each account), this was not scalable. I now have an automated approach to doing this with LR- it's not great, but it works. I'm selling these notes for an average discount of around 5-7%. I'll still have several months of selling to go before they are all sold, but it's a work in progress. Selling the FICO drops should address a large part of my losses going forward.
2. Late notes in general- My FICO issues when scores dropped enough turned into my late notes- used to have a good way of handling these, but the tool I used stopped working well. (IR) That led to my change of tools to LR and having to rethink/adapt my strategy based on the limitations of LR- and there are a lot. I think I'm close to where I was before- I now see a fair number of my late notes selling prior to the dreaded 90% discount right before they are charged off.
With all of that said- my IRA account looks like it'll be even for the year, and my Taxable account might make a small return. Not looking forward to seeing what the losses are at tax time, I'm sure that will be depressing.
For those looking to compare- my size accounts typically have ~250-350 notes in varying stages of lateness each month. I'm typically seeing $1500-2K in chargeoffs a month. I am heavily biased towards the D-G notes, only buying seasoned (Buying the new notes is what got me in trouble), and trying to sell good notes for a markup to offset the losses. (Surprisingly I sell quite a few notes at 8-10% markup, just not enough yet...)
You actually get sales with a markup? That's amazing, but I always have to remember that not everyone is like me and looking for a bargain.
I second this as well. Guess people are ok with paying a premium for their certain YTM on notes.
I'm one of those who early on realized that buying at a premium is not that big of a deal when I'm mainly buying E-G notes. I've limited it to 2.5%.
I just checked what my disocunt/premium for the notes I bought and the min is -2% and max is 4%, soon to be 5.5%, and a median of 1.25%. Not bad I would say.
How did you check that?
I have a spreadsheet will different info of each note bought/sold for tax purposes.
I'm giving up on P2P unless the interest rate on C loans and below increase 10%+. Same underwriting standards but going to earn ~0% net of losses. Disappointed.
http://247wallst.com/banking-finance/2016/11/16/surge-in-online-loan-defaults-sends-shockwaves-through-the-industry/
If you read the whole article it says that subprime auto loans are at a six year high for defaults, so it's not just a P2P thing, but an industry wide problem. In any case won't stop me or many others to continue to lend.
I have lost as much money to defaults as I have made in Lending Club.
I am still ahead and have made money, but I would make more money if I shifted my money to Fidelity and polaced it in a DJ linked fund.
Slowly, I am moving my funds out, not reinvesting.
My charge offs are currently higher than my interest earned YTD -- but that's because I've been selling off performing notes to exit the LC market.
LC doesn't even respond to simple bug fixes, like the attached screenshot of my e-mail account on a weekly basis when all my Folio notes get de-listed -- though 200+ notes are done in a single transaction, they insist on blowing up my e-mail account and phone with a random smattering of 40+ emails over 10 minutes. Complained about this issue in March and several other times -- they claimed they would address it, but that was last March.
In the last 4 years, I've averaged 7.3 percent return -- ultimately decided there is really not a market exposure/diversification benefit to this and its not worth the hassle.
FOLIO is not ran by LC. When they come into my gmail account I can click on the first one and delete them all.
New "investor" here. I started an account with $8K of mad money about a month ago as an educational project. I wanted to see what a passive source of funds would experience, so I let LC auto-invest for me evenly split A/B/C/D.
I thought I would share the experience here, since this isolates mid-to-late October issuance. First month quality:
165 issued notes
3 notes paid in full in first month
22 notes have not reached 1st payment (or are processing/current)
7 notes IGP
So, payment on 7 of the 140 notes which have come up on their first payment date failed.
Collection logs indicate most were NSF, but a couple of the logs showed no entry for the type of payment failure. One collection log is completely blank.
out of 12 portfolios my worst performing portfolio was the one invested by LC.
RawRaw,
Who is leaving the mutual fund at inopportune times? The managers of the fund or investors like us?
I measure all my investments against what I could get if I just left my money in an S&P 500 linked fund.
At the moment (actually, for the past 10 years) my Fidelity investments have been earning me more, way more, than the 4-5% I am getting from LC right now.
I am convinced that if I understood the statistical tool of factor analysis, I could use it to choose LC loans more effectively.
FYI, Nov statements are available. Took a loss on my taxable account for the first time. Disturbing. ROTH is still good. May need to get even more conservative on my taxable account.
Taxable - stopped investing for 6 months - restartedROTH - stopped investing 6 months ago - not restartedAdded charting showing my percentage of lates and charge offs relative to me stop purchasing notes.
Taxable - Interest Radar tracking data charted
Another statement and another new month.
All D' and E's; WAIR 17.43%, Weighted average age 26.9 months.
Primary notes returns 7.18%, Traded notes returns 16.73% and Combined returns are 7.96%.
Much of this was to be expected. I stopped reinvesting on 5/9 and did not resume until 8/30.
Also I sold half my portfolio in July - August and virtually all notes sold were current, never late. I kept all the bad stuff.
So, maybe 5 or so months of 2x charge offs were already baked in.
I'm expecting to see the blue and red bars begin to converge. Unfortunately it's looking like that might be in the 60% to 80% range.
This was absolutely my worst month dollars wise, but in the long run I still think Jan 16 was my worst overall.
I do have some optimism for the future; my delinquency rate has begun to drop. Hopefully a leading indicator of better things to come.
This is not to suggest that LC delinquency rates are falling; quite the opposite.
Only that the effects of the reduction of my portfolio size has begun to reduce my overly high delinquency rate to whatever's appropriate for a portfolio of that new size.
My numbers this month look a lot.better but I also realized I have sold more late notes than before. I need to sit down and go through my folio statements and look at the amount lost per late sale per month and see how that effects things.
This was my 3rd negative month since July. July, September and November all generated losses. Those losses for the most part wiped out all the gains in August and October. I haven't purchased any new loans since early June.
Considering my IGP and late categories aren't seeing any slowdown, I don't think I'll really be on a positive trajectory for a long while at this point.
What has killed me the most as I've mentioned previously is early payoffs. I've had 928 loans pay off early. That's 28% of all the notes I ever bought. My LC account hasn't even been open 3 years yet so the first note I ever bought hasn't even run its course to maturity. If all the good borrowers pay off early then this whole system doesn't make sense. And if they pay off after 12 months, we are hit with an early payoff penalty in the form of 1% of the outstanding balance to make it even worse.
If defaults and early payoffs hold steady, it's possible that I will only break even or experience losses going forward.
Personally I think that going forward LC, Prosper (mpl's), et al will find themselves unable to compete with Marcus, Discover, et al for the most credit worthy borrowers. The "banks" have the advantage and desire to make loans to the most credit worthy borrowers (LC A and top B grades) and they probably aren't very much interested in the more risky loans. LC borrowers in this most credit worthy category are prime targets for poaching. The day will likely come when mpl's are relegated to making only the more risky loans the "banks" don't want on their balance sheets.
Kind of what I was afraid of. I had been lazy listing late notes since they hadn't really been selling lately. But last month they did more than average.
So the sales stopped the losses from being larger, but also hid that the month wasn't as good as we'd like.
I had liquidated my taxable account in anticipation of rolling over a Roth IRA to Lending Club for 2017. This thread is one of the reasons I'm hesitating now.
Higher utilization does not lower your FICO?
5 digits of cc bal in jan combined with score around 795 (after util goes up, score will go down) will = sweet spot for debtcon junkmail.
i was holding everything fairly steady, for a while, at ~0% util, experimenting with combining multiple cards from a single issuer into a single line - ie, going from 2 x $1k amex to 1 x $2k amex kind of thing - as well as seeing what i could learn re: effects of average age.
won't share my findings there, but will say that the old authorized user trick still seems to work - took friend from ~650 to ~770 w/an authorized user tradeline from one of my cards (had no negative effect on me, but fico 08 jumped friend's score as soon as reported).
algorithms are fun. i get bored easily. i want to know how stuff works. etc.
You guys are right on utilization hitting FICO. Using my house buying and remodeling experiment I can say that I went from almost 0% utilization and a score around 780 and within a month or two I had a mortgage and $40k in financed debt at 0%. My score dropped to 660-670 range and my utilization jumped over 60%. I am now down to about 30% utilization and saw the biggest single jump since I started paying it all off. 30% utilization is a magic number on your overall score but also on individual cards it seems. To maximize a score I would keep overall utilization below 30% and all of the individual lines of credit below 30% as well.
I should have everything but the mortgage paid off by next fall. It has been an interesting ride...credit wise.
The authorized user thing worked for me too. My score was higher than the wife's and making her an authorized user on mine jumped her score significantly and didn't impact mine at all.
So, I am paying some bills and did another check. This last month I had a ton of work related expenses that all hit at once. I run those through my card instead of work so that I can get the rewards points for it. They are quick to pay and I don't have to float it very long. Those expenses pushed me back up over the 30% usage for the month and dropped by FICO by 20 points. 30% is definitely a breaking point.
For quite a long time my fico was around 804. Within the past year I went on a "application spree". Got an AARP Visa, PENFED Visa, Amex Blue. Already had Freedom, CapOne, DoubleCash and USAA. The AARP and Amex Blue came with a 12 month and 18 month interest free period. Had no decent balance transfer so I didn't do that. What I did do was charge the heck out of the AARP & Amex. Amex had limit of $20,000. Up to a month ago I had that up to $11,000 (over 50%). AARP had limit of $15,000. Up to a month ago I had that up to $3,400 (20%)
A few months ago I got a balance transfer offer of 0% 18 months 2% fee from Capone. I grabbed that. Limit was $20,000. I wrote checks to myself for $17,000. That put me at 85% utilization. A short time later I got an offer from Freedom for 0% for 12 months with NO fee. I grabbed that. Limit is $17,000. Took out all 17,000. 100% utilization.
In case you are wondering, I planned this and did it for a special purpose. Just got REAL lucky with that FREEDOM offer.
All told I had around $123,000 in credit limit on these cards. My overall utilization across all cards was 40%. My Fico went from 804 to 733.
Decided to change my Penfed HELOC to a 5/5 plan (to lock in the 3.75% for the next 5 years...inflation WILL come back you know). Worried about my fico hurting my chance for that rate so paid down cards to get utilization down somewhat.
Took Amex down to $9,000. Utilization is 45%
Took freedom down to $8,000. Utilization is 48%
Took Capone down to $13,800. Utilization is 69%
Too AARP down to $3,000. Utilization is 20%
Overall utilization now at 27.5%.
Just checked my Fico from 4 different Credit Cards (offering free fico scores) and Fico ranges from 765 to 773 with above utilization.
So apparently my score only tumbled around 70 points with the heaviest utilization. It only dropped around 20 points with my latest utilization.
Here is the latest from Prosper that came today. They are way past their 'second attempt'.
http://imgur.com/a/YuNZ9
About one year ago:
Today:
Kinda says it all doesn't it. I'm not talking about my own dot, but the whole of the data.
Wow, your image had me really depressed looking at the dip in the graph that appears around 13 months. Especially since I am at 14.5months. It made me wonder what the average return for a given average age was.
Note that it is based on number of accounts, not dollar value, but still it is pretty damn obvious.
This also reminded me I promised to add graphs to the my site. I'll try to do that soon.
Is anybody NOT taking money out? I know I am taking out all the cash as it comes in now and investing elsewhere. I mean c'mon, tax free bonds have better returns than LC p2p right now. Do they think investors will just accept these returns? 4-5% is not worth the trouble/risk.
Think we were hit with a double wammy of lower interest rates over about 18 months and degredation of borrower performance more recently. Interest rates have been significantly increased and that's a big plus. LC claims they've tightened their lending standards but we have yet to see evidence of that. Hope it's true. Yes, I scaled back my investment in July-August by about 50% but have now resumed reinvestments and have zero cash available.
FWIW the loans I'm buying today on average have the best risk / reward score of any time since I began with LC four years ago. However, risk has definitely risen and it's by no means certain I'm adequately reflecting this increased risk. Time will tell, but I'm strangely optimistic. There's either a light at the end of the tunnel or an oncoming train.
I am collecting cash from payments, but just letting it sit in LC for now. All of my loans are from 2015 and early 2016, which has shown to be a dud vintage. It seems like the vintage is more important than just about anything else right now. Until Fred93's awesome vintage chart looks better (
http://forum.lendacademy.com/index.php/topic,4113.msg38557.html#msg38557) I am on hold. Maybe I'll buy some A-C grades before that, but we'll see.
I have just been buying aged notes on the secondary platform with LendingRobot at least 10 months old. I have yet to graph my misery like the rest of you as I haven't had the time. I should post my login information so one of you can do it for me
I stopped trying to think about it.
However, I did sell all my equities in my Roth IRA and they are sitting in cash and I moved my entire 401k out of equities and in the safest option I had (I wish cash was an option). I have a feeling after the baseless euphoria wears off...there might be some revaluation in the stock market. Just a hunch.
Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
I too have just been buying aged notes on the secondary platform with Lending Robot, and in addition selling my notes that have FICO issues. Unfortunately I've had many (1k or so) FICO notes in each account. This year will largely be a loss in terms of income when the FICO sales are combined with my charge offs. Buying very few new notes as many don't meet my criteria. Hoping once the FICO sales are done my returns will return to positive.
Are you seeing that FICO has really dried up? Might actually start having to buy notes with a markup that meets my YTM.
Sure wish I would have just started out with FOLIO as notes from the primary market just continue to tank.
What evidence is there that we lend on the fringe?
We are nowhere near a peak for the credit cycle. On nearly any metric, we are still near all time lows. I'd be careful to keep this in mind when framing your expectations.
The average household owes $16k in credit card debt. That is $747B total. They pay an average of almost $1,300/yr of interest alone. Total personal debt of Americans is over $12 trillion. The average American has a FICO score at 695. For many Americans getting an LC loan is a step in the direction of rebuilding their credit score and saving themselves money.
Debt consolidation can save hundreds of dollars a month, just in interest alone for a lot of these people. You call them fringe, I call them typical Americans from all walks of life. Could they get better loans from Banks? Why are they not there and are here instead? A and B are definitely the safest, no disputing that, but there are also plenty G notes that are safe too.
On a personal note, I have 6 credit cards, not one of them under 22%. I would not care if they were all over 40%, I do not carry a balance. I have not asked for an APR reduction, just no need to. Do I consider myself on the fringe? I guess if having over 750 FICO, fringe.
Not many of my notes I buy on FOLIO are under C. But it is not the grade I care about its the YTM. Yes, it is because of the ANAR. My ANAR is killed by having so many A/B notes that were accidently bought when I opened my account.
Delinquency rate is hard to interpret without knowing whether magnitude of delinquent amount is low or magnitude of outstanding balance is high and without knowing the growth rate in delinquent amount and in outstanding balance. Based on recent news articles, I believe delinquency rate is low not because delinquencies are down but because outstanding balance on credit cards is rising at faster rate. Delinquency rate is not going to rise significantly until credit card issuers slow down extending credit that will make delinquency rate a trailing indicator.
Anil, some of the credit agencies publish vintage delinquency curves. May be a good place to look. From what I've seen as I haphazardly read the reports, most credit metrics are still exceptionally good.
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I log a daily snapshot of my account details (well, my software does) and I thought it would be interesting to take a look at Adjustments for Past Due Notes as a percentage of Principal Balance. This data isn't available in the monthly statements. Adjustment percentages are the standard LC 9 month loss estimates for In Grace, Late 16-30, Late 31-120 and Default:
https://www.lendingclub.com/account/investorReturnsAdjustments.action.
The following chart takes a look at my account since February this year on a weekly basis:
All things equal the adjustment percentage should fall back to the 3% level at some point in time after the principal balance stabilized in mid-September. However all things aren't equal and in my view the percentage has remained stubbornly high (5.2%). Doesn't look like it's coming down to 3% anytime soon. It's likely another confirmation of the erosion of loan performance since late May and it will be very interesting to see where this value finally settles out. At this level my account essentially breaks even. I'd sure be interested in the value others are seeing, particularly those with WAIR's in the 17% area.
WAIR 15% on 1670 active notes average age of 14.8 months mine is at 4.0% And I stopped everything just over 2 months ago so not really many new notes to skew that value much vs the average age.
Success! I returned to profitability this month.
I don't track IRR, but seems like a ~5-6% return this year, which is down from prior years. And my stocks went up 30%. Have to love uncorrelated assets!
And I disagree that the conclusion is you have to watch "alternative" investments (you should! just wrong conclusion). The conclusion is you shouldn't just lend to the riskier people and expect defaults never to occur.
Five months of consecutive losses. Charge offs as a percent of trailing 5 months interest (blue bars) very near an all time high. The only good news is that I'm "only" losing half what I would have if not for downsizing my portfolio. Part of this could be seasonal and I'm not giving up completely quite yet.
The jump in your red bars is astonishing. It is not like the charge-offs slowly increased, they basically shot up very quickly.
My full year losses were nearly 80% of the interest I earned. My early years with LC this ratio was more of a constant 33%. My last few months, the losses have exceeded my interest earned. This better improve soon. I've stopped reinvesting my taxable account for the foreseeable future.
I knew lending club was a scam as soon as the rep called me asking me why I was trying to withdraw from my account. Right after that, the liquidity in the market dried up, bringing my 20% down to a -1% return in a few months. I now have a slew of charge offs.
The model is completely unsustainable since they do not hire the right credit analysts/statisticians and severely underestimate the risk of their borrowers. The platform only benefits debtors esp. those that commit financial fraud.
-As for me,
I am pulling out of Lending Club ASAP and looking for a partner to start a real, legit payday loans company.
The liquidity in the FOLIO market dried up? You took 20% returns and turned them into -1% in a few months?
When you bail out taking losses, what do you expect your returns to do? I remember reading, might have been your initial post, but you were buying notes that were 31-120 days late. Personally I think that is the craziest strategy for someone just getting into FOLIO, could ever do and just playing with fire. Absolutely you are going to have a slew of charge-offs with this kind of excessively risky strategy. I can only guess that you were overpaying for notes at 31-120 days late and then turned around and tried to sell them at the same discount and could not find any takers.
This is his post I was referring to. I hope I am not sounding like a jerk to him, just questioning his post and his extremely risky strategy.
Based on my qualitative assessment, I wouldn't even pay 50% for it. The borrower was 16-30 days late how many times? Yeah, that's a big risk of default; might as well be 16-30 days late already and those are selling up to 75% (or even more) discount.
Now that 2016 is over I decided to take a look at year over year profitability since I began investing in LC in May of 2013. The computation was simple. Just took the change in Account Value for each year and divided by the starting Account Value of that year. My LC results were:
2013 6.2% (partial year, began investing in May, or about 10.6% annualized)
2014 12.1%
2015 7.6%
2016 3.1% (paused reinvesting May-Sept, sold about 50% of account value on Folio Aug-Sept)
I was really spoiled early with great returns.
Maybe this thread should be "Worst Year Yet".
FWIW my Prosper results were:
2014 1.5% (partial year, began investing in Jul, very slowly invested, lots of cash drag)
2015 7.1%
2016 2.7% (stopped investing in late October and have no plans to resume)
Here's to a better 2017!
Here's to a better 2017!
[/quote]
Based on the downward trajectory of the data on the 'Understanding Your Returns' chart, 2017 will be a bad year for LC investors. Lending Club is now advertising that note investors earn 5-7% but that is based on portfolios over an age of 30 months. The portfolios at 12-18 months are actually earning -8% to 8%. In a couple of years once these portfolios age out and go down over time, the 30 month age portfolio return will be at -10% to 0%. By mid-2018, I forecast that the returns on portfolios that average 30 months on the 'Understanding Your Returns' chart will be negative.
Amazing that the returns are this bad even with an okay economy. If there is a recession in the next couple of years, these returns will be lower than -10%. As I warned the OP Rob in December 2015 when he originally posted, stop investing in LC. Much better investments out there with better returns with much less risk.
I've started cutting back from around $50k to around $25k invested, mostly passively but I think I want to accelerate that slightly now. I expect LC returns to slowly improve from the last 5 months and stabilize at some point, but it will be lower than the historical returns. I don't expect any sharp improvement, and I'm very uncertain of the final EV, which is why I'm drawing back.
At any rate, I would note that this is seasonally the time of year for things to go south with late payments and defaults, so the default merely not getting worse for the next few months might indicate a positive trend.
Okay, thanks.
I started investing in 2014 and added most of my money in the first quarter of 2015. I haven't added anything since then, but have reinvested, mostly in C,D, E notes. I invest in both new and resale notes. I have over 1000 notes bought new and an average weighted interest rate of 16.45%. The average age is 17.9 mos and my blue dot is near the top of the crowd--I don't stand out from the crowd, but I'm near the top of it. My adjusted ANR is 6.37% and my non-adjusted is 8.97. That being said, I've noticed a definite increase in bad loans the past few months. My adjustment is higher than it has ever been. However, according to the press, that is not unusual, in fact LC has raised its rates twice in the last few months because losses have exceeded expectations.
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OK, I will bite. What other investments are you looking at?
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I am just referring to normal traditional investments like stocks and bonds. If looking for more diversification, you can add high yielding utility stocks or REITs, or high-yield bonds or foreign bonds, but I don't think LC loans are needed in any investor's portfolio. If LC investments had realized the 10% return that they were projecting a few years ago it would be a good investment. But many LC's investors portfolios are now earning less than 0%. And LC is now projecting 5% for current investments but the reality will be much worse. Long Term Treasuries and Government agency bonds are now paying 3-4%. Why bother with the extra trouble and risk to invest in LC loans.
Here' an interesting charge off, Loan id: 65108282, customer last paid in August, but looking at the call log, LC barely even attempted to collect, I can only assume this was a C&D, but they didn't list it in the call log. I have another loan similar to this one with limited details in the call log before getting charging it.
And yes, this is one of those where the borrow says, the checks will be mailed and to never be heard from again.
This was not my worst month, still interest positive for now, this tread seemed like the best place post this.
here's another one, failed payment 12/7, nothing else listed in a call log. Has something changed with LC's call logging or collections process? Anyone else seeing similar?
Loan id Loan id: 64008463
It isn't uncommon in consumer lending to use models to determine which customers should be contacted first. LendingClub may rely on this sort of model to focus collections on where it seems to make the most sense. But over the years I think we've learned those logs are often inaccurate and miss events that occur.
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If they are forgetting to log when they contact the borrower, then that is a bigger problem altogether, and a failure of internal controls and compliance on LC's part. I've had several notes I've had to sell because the notes go into grace period and there is no log of contact from the time the payment is due to the supposed settlement date and after that date. At some point I am going to call customer service to see what is up about that, because from this and logs with multiple calls but no message left is simply frustrating. When I worked at Springleaf, now OneMain, from last June to September all late borrowers got left a message if they didn't answer the phone.
Another monthly statement, another loss.
I was down in July, up in August, down in September, up in October, down in November, up in December, and now down in January. Basically breakeven over the last 7 months.
Early payoffs have been devastating.
Oh man! I just got slammed.
Jan was one of my worst months ever!
It's hard to grasp that more than 30% of borrowers are paying off their loans early and we're not allowed to know why. I mean, hey we're just retail investors, what business is it of ours to know about the industry's strangest anomaly where we lose out on tons of interest, causing in my case to generate repeated negative monthly returns?
Oh and Lending Club charges the retail investor a 1% penalty on early payoffs on the outstanding principal for any loan older than 12 months. So we pay a fee but we're not allowed to know what's leading to these early payoffs.
Lending Club has no problem sending out solicitations to invest even more money though.
January was my first negative month since opening my LC account in 2010. More distressingly, I opened a 2nd account in 2014 and it was negative in January, too, despite normally being uncorrelated with my initial account. Something is rotten in Denmark, methinks.
Certainly not my worst month. For the first month in six I was in the black ($110.33; zowie).
Blue and read bars converging so maybe the effects of my Folio sales in the fall are behind me.
The bad news is that my delinquency rate is rising again. Future isn't lookin good ...
I made money again this month. Second month of profitability after a dip due to credit. But 65% of my portfolio is ABC grades. Seems like my returns have stabilized
Also, prepayments occur in all consumer lending. The existence of prepayments isn't alarming by itself. but coupled with LC's revenue model, it is something to pay attention to.
I took a loss in both my taxable and IRA accounts in January (been up and down this year). I've been investing with BP aggressive filter for a while now - I'm going to keep with it for another 6 months or so but I'm not convinced I'm making a wise decision.
Yeah. its kind of frustration. At the very beginning of Jan I started investing in Bs and a tiny % of Cs again. Then you all talked about it in a few thread and made me feel better about my decision. I was actually about to up the investment per note to help catch up from the large cash backup I have and then this happens. Not sure what I am going to do now.
FWIW my default/charged off by grade
And my notes per month of issue date.
I'm concentrated in such a small range of dates of a defunct vintage. I'm not sure there is anything I could have done to prevent any of this. Well other than not having switched to folio excluding buying after the May mess because that just concentrated my notes even more. Discounted loss...
From the looks of it you've already done a lot. It appears you pretty much stopped reinvesting last May. Only about 15% of your notes are in the May 16 through Jan 17 period so you took a lot of cash off the LC table during that period. That was probably a good thing; particularly with what we now know from LC's recent 8-k filing.
Since you made a very substantial change in invested dollars over the past 6 months you might want to chart chargeoffs lagged by 5 or 6 months versus interest received to get a better picture of "badness". Another data point to help decide what to do next.
Well, I stopped making deposits in Jan of 2016 as I had as much money in LC as I wanted. I wanted to give it a year or so to see how things actually progressed. Kind of glad I did... So that last spike up is that money investing. On May 5th I stop investing in new loans and wrote an automated folio buyer buying at deep discounts. Which in turn made even more of my loans late 2015/early 2016. The stepping down from there is just a result of 2016 loans slowly coming available on folio.
If its not clear:
Here are the results for the strategy:
After checking Lending Club maybe a dozen times, I've come to the conclusion that buying in-grace notes is simply not a viable strategy. Lack of liquidity is the issue: there are simply not enough notes available. Even if you could develop a computer vision robot, you'd be lucky to even snag 5 25/50 notes per month. In theory, the cure rate should be more than 65% (and even more than the cure rate of regular in-grace notes), but even if only 50% cure, you would end up with a 38-45% return. I've defaulted back to the penny note strategy for E/F/G notes. This seems to be safer than buying them straight out. Right now, my combined return is -2.04%. I'll update when I get positive/change services.
You might be interested in my blog posts on delinquent notes in secondary market.
Selling Delinquent Notes on Lending Club Folio Secondary Market, Part 1: Loss Aversion
https://www.peercube.com/blog/post/selling-delinquent-notes-on-lending-club-folio-secondary-market-part-1-loss-aversionTrading Delinquent Notes, Part 2: Needle in the Haystack
https://www.peercube.com/blog/post/trading-delinquent-notes-part-2-needle-in-the-haystackI haven't got around to posting the third part in this series yet though wrote draft soon after publishing part 2 (draft needed too much cleanup based on feedback and other higher priority stuff showed up).
Very insightful. I hadn't even taken the collection fees into account. Your commentator is spot on: it pretty much kills all incentive to invest in them.
It looks like I finally turned the corner with notes going IGP...its about time
. Only have 1 note in grace right now (out of 533 current). In January I had around 6-7 in grace at any given time. Previous months I mostly had double digit graces at any given time.
I figure the reason might be that since most of my notes only have 2-4 more payments left (weighted average age is 33 months) my borrowers have finally figured out that they might as well "stick it out" and just continue paying. I have no real proof of that except anecdotally. I notice a few of my notes taking a plunge in Fico score but still remaining current in payments (so far). I think they are making those payments because they realize they only have a few more payments left. In the past I think they would have just said "to heck with this stuff" and stopped.
Feb 2017 was my best month in quite some time (5.3% annualized net profitable return).
The red and blue have converged so the effects of my selling last year have passed.
Red and blue will begin to diverge again as I have paused reinvestments.
However, as you see delinquencies seem to have leveled off at about 2X 18 months ago.
The average age of my portfolio is now 37.5 months.
I stopped reinvesting the minute the news hit about Laplance, having learned my lesson from Madoff, Platinum Partners etc.
By luck that was the right time to stop.
All my notes were 36 month notes and I withdraw funds daily.
I should have my initial investment out in about 3 more months.
As for the yield it has been staying at a consistent 6-7% since I stopped reinvesting.
No complaints, and I will probably keep reinvesting my earnings as soon as my principal is out.
I had a net positive month!
Congratulations!! Where's the party??
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I lost money again.
This month for the first time since June of 16 my charge offs exceeded my 5 month lagged interest.
Also exceeded my interest this month; thus the net monthly loss.
No improvement in delinquencies either:
No way to put a positive spin on things other than my cash continues to rise and losses in dollar terms are quite small.
At least that's something.
Taxable account - Nov & Dec were months where I loss more than earned but things are looking up.
ROTH account - this account was even more conservative than my taxable one but had very similar patterns
I have been withdrawing from this account for several months. I plan on start reinvesting in a 2 or 3 months when I hit an set amount.
Looking forward to seeing everyone's numbers improve in this table too.
Via:
http://forum.lendacademy.com/index.php/topic,3365.570.html
Update for March.
The 3 mo moving average looks like its still moving up.
Another month, another loss. That's losses in 7 of the past 9 months.
Watched "The Big Short" again last night. Feels like my LC portfolio is one big sub-prime MBS (okay its tiny).
And, I know, it could get a whole lot worse.
I almost exactly match last month. Though interestingly enough the amount of interest and the loss amount is rather different.
Number of lates are still trending down
In the midst of a pretty good bloodbath myself. April was solid, but now a very big spike in BKs. Dumb me, part was my fault with buying the same note 4x on FOLIO. One of the big pitfalls with using NSR.
Bad luck, or bad strategy on my part? Starting to wonder. My returns are still good for what I expect, just not as good as I want.
Another month, another statement (May 2017), but this month a profit ($21.63 or 0.03% of principal invested)!
Same old, same old as you see:
My updates including May data...
Chargeoffs in my account were really low this month. Don't know why. I have over 5000 loans, which you would expect to be large enough so that random variation from month to month would not be this large, yet I am skeptical, as I don't see such a drop in other folks' accounts.
My late ratio chart shows not only my account, but also LC's broad based fund, and consumer credit delinquency reported by the St Lous Fed. Reports from the fund and the fed take longer to get. What you see is latest available.
So things look like they've stabilized, ie not getting worse at the moment.
I have been really anxious for this month's statements to be released with so many people in the understanding your returns thread talking bout pulling out. My numbers are still improving and my number of late and grace notes are still trending down.
I'm about 80% $25 notes, rest $50 and $75
Just straight averages here as I only have a few minutes vs WAIR
Current: 13.99
Grace: 16.33
Late: 16.19
I don't have the dollar values for late available off hand, but I do have the counts.
Slight uptick in Late 31 with a drop in grace to match as expected.
Déjà vu, another losing month.
However, I'm pleased the losses are extremely small and my outstanding principal is declining at about 9% per month.
What's the saying?? "All good things must come to an end" ...
Things are not improving for me. Delinquencies heading towards a new high and another losing month.
Thought things might be getting better, but I was wrong.
Man. Stinks. My month was still improving more. My charge off as percent of interest is sub 35%. Though I did have a slight uptick in the 31 day + late count.
I stopped re-investing months ago in my main LC acct (except for the small amount in my IRA acct). I'm not selling on folio, I'm just letting things naturally wind down I haven't had a positive month in quite a while. Thankfully, I'm only losing a small amount each month, but still, its sad to see.
Same here. Taxable account is halfway liquidated- When I get a bit more sold off, the focus will become the IRA account. I want to take what I've learned liquidating my Taxable account and apply it to the IRA so I can get it disposed of quickly and get the money back into a money making mode.
This was my first ever negative month, after taxes and charge offs. I brought it on myself by deliberately changing my standards for the Dec. 2016 portfolio.
Sadly no improvement and another losing month.
There have been some discussions in other threads about whether chargeoffs are simply getting back to their pre-crisis status and how bad could things get when the next recession comes along. Take a look at the "NET ANNUALIZED RETURN BY VINTAGE" interactive chart at:
https://www.lendingclub.com/info/demand-and-credit-profile.action. Current NAR performance for many grades and terms is at or below 2008 and/or 2009 levels. For example
C grade, 36 month, 2015 vintage at 20 months on book are the lowest in history. The 2016 vintage curve for same is at the same level as the 2015 vintage curve at 8 MOB. There's some really interesting data here. Its reinforced my view that the current and seemingly persistent depressed NAR levels are the result of the combination of the lowering of interest rates and the expansion of chargeoffs. The expansion of chargeoffs is a result of both consumer behavior and lowered underwriting criteria. I'm not seeing any turnarounds and these problems won't fix themselves.
Got my Sept statement. I still have a net loss YTD. Kind of sucks.
More of the same. Another losing month. Delinquencies near all time highs.
Better times are on the way though; LC said so.
Yep, I am negative for the year now.
I'm letting my taxable account slowly wind down naturally. I continue to have negative months, but thankfully not losing much.
Question: how do I move money out of my IRA acct (thankfully only about 5k) without inciting a penalty?
If by "penalty" you mean IRS penalty then I think the safest way is as follows:
1) Log into your LC account and use "TRANSFER" and "WITHDRAW FUNDS" to move cash from your LC IRA account to your LC IRA custodian account (typically SDIRA).
2) If you do not already have it, open the same type of IRA account (Traditional, Roth, etc.) where you want the LC money to be moved. That institution will have a form for you to use to request a direct "trustee-to-trustee transfer" of assets from SDIRA to them. This is NOT a rollover (see
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/ira-one-rollover-per-year-rule).
3) Fill out their form and return it to them signed and possibly notarized.
4) Upon receipt they will sign it as the receiving custodial trustee and then mail it to SDIRA requesting the transfer of cash to them.
5) When SDIRA receives the form they will send them your money as a "trustee-to-trustee" direct transfer".
All of this will take quite a while. You should first contact the institution to where you want your money moved and verify the correct procedure; it's been a while and I may have it wrong.
I believe SDIRA charges $100 for each transfer (partial account termination) $250 to close an account (see
https://quikforms.com/viewform/zpWO-bdqRaBQN). LC only pays your $100 annual SDIRA account fee if your LC balance is above a certain amount (I forget how much). You should keep this in mind when timing your exit and possibly use Folio to sell notes at the end to avoid paying an annual SDIRA fee yourself. I've never seen a post by anyone who has completely closed out their LC and SDIRA accounts. Once all the notes are fully paid or charged off there's still the possibility some small amount will accrue to an LC account due to recoveries. Wonder how this works after the accounts are closed?
Well, I am about to find out as I am currently dumping my notes on Folio. I have about $1K left. Someone has been getting good deals on mature notes.
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Has anyone looked into the possibility of selling notes in IRA and buying same notes in Taxable account as IRA liquidation strategy? I don't know the IRS/tax consequences of such strategy and not a tax expert but can't imagine anything being wrong with an exchange at fair market value. Sell your Current notes at par value from IRA and then buying same notes in taxable account might speed up the IRA liquidation. Sell delinquent notes at maximum discount listed on Folio for same loan or at LC claimed loss rates might be a fair value exchange between IRA and Taxable account.
Interesting idea. I have been liquidating both my regular and Roth IRA LendingClub accounts for a little over a year now. I am now down to about $8,000 in the Roth IRA account.
I know there was a long thread some time ago about selling and buying between the regular and Roth IRA accounts. I think the conclusion was it was not a good idea and probably violated the self-dealing restrictions on IRAs. But I remember that discussion being about theoretically selling regular LC notes at a loss in the regular account and taking the losses off your taxes. One's LC IRA would buy them at the discount price and reap the profit (with no taxes if a Roth IRA) in the higher true value. Which is not what you are suggesting, of course.
The other thing that bothers me about the IRA account is that I have some recovery money coming in from old chargeoffs. Someone else said you can still close the IRA account to get out of paying fees, but you have to agree to forfeit future recoveries from charged off IRA Notes. Probably not worth it to pay a $100 annual fee plus $50 fee if one wants to transfer the money to my Vanguard IRA. My net recovery amount for Sept 2017 was about $10.
Here are a couple of threads about selling notes between regular and IRA accounts:
http://forum.lendacademy.com/?topic=506http://forum.lendacademy.com/?topic=883This thread below was about someone
selling from IRA to regular account, selling at inflated price in order to get more money into the IRA than the annual contribution limit (so not relevant to our liquidation discussion here, but interesting otherwise).
http://forum.lendacademy.com/?topic=1130
After being on mental auto pilot for a while I took a look at my own returns and had a small stroke. I'm sure this has been addressed, but is anyone else flaming mad over LC going public, basically creating a legal mandate for increasing their own profit that trumps profit or even any protection for the people actually taking the risk (us)? In a nutshell, now they Have to prioritize their own profit by law, and whether they get it from the lenders or the borrowers is irrelevant. As we can see.
Basically, stockholders are betting on *US* to go on providing a good return for LC regardless of what the borrowers are doing, as opposed to the earning model in which the borrowers are the ones generating income for the company. We've gone from paying fees to cover the cost of the middleman to "promising" a return for investors who have nothing to do with the social process of P2P lending. We are providing great stability for lending club's stockholders, at our own cost. Our profit is at risk from deadbeat borrowers as has always been the case and is the risk we signed up for, but now it also gets tugged at from the other side, from the middleman twiddling with lending standards and - I think - quicker charge-offs, that leave us holding the bag. As far as I know, we never got the option of opting out when LC decided to exchange our support for borrowers to support for profiteers, other than the arduous and sometimes expensive process of liquidating our loans one by one. Basically, we got put in chains as far as being beholden to stockholders.
I predicted this decline in anything good for us when LC first went public, and I think the current swamp is at least in good part that chicken coming home to roost. Good grief and, I think, good riddance already. Arduous and expensive is probably still better than being a patsy.
They definitely lowered standards and lowered rates after going public to try and increase revenue, but LC has been hurting as well (just look at their profits, stock price, etc.). I think the big difference is just the increased competition in the field. Before it was just LC and prosper. Now Goldman Sachs, American Express, Discover financial, Sofi, Earnest, Bestegg, etc. are all in the same field. There is just so much competition. As a result, both LC stockholders and LC investors are hurting. The only people who are benefiting from all of this are borrowers (especially the ones who just take their $40,000 and run away, lol).
So much for my tongue in cheek "better times ahead" comment last month. Need I even say it; another losing month.
Delinquencies have now risen to an all time high. I'm gonna need a bigger boat (well, bigger y-axis maximum value).
I've added a third graph tracking monthly profitability as an annualized percentage of principal invested and fondly look back on the likely-never-to-be seen-again good old days.
Your last graph says it all. I too miss the 14% days. People ask why we're leaving- show them that.
I see charts like that and I'm thankful I'm almost fully liquidated. It's taken way longer than I expected to do, but seeing the losses piling up for others as well, confirms I'm dong the right thing for me.
-$0.86 this month. First negative one in a few.
I had a negative month too. Will definitely finish negative for the entire year.
The most painful thing is paying taxes on an investment where you lose money for the year which will be my case. It will take me years to use up all the capital losses. That was my big mistake in pursuing this investment, not realizing that mismatch. Your net return might be 3%, but you're paying taxes as if you earned 20% if you invested in low-grade loans while an investment in higher grade loans might net out very similarly but without that huge capital loss you can't use for years.
I'm trying to put these thread updates into context. We know there is a *account* performance curve that bottoms out at around 15 mo, based on the weighted average age of the holdings within the account. We know that an account with continuous re-investment of note payments (and little contribution of new funds) should eventually stabilize at a weighted age of around 15 mo, if heavily skewed towards 36 mo notes. The curves that LC presents are not weighted by account *size*, however... one hypothesis is that the performance distribution of accounts with a weighted age out 20-30 months are getting lifted by accounts skewed towards 60 mo notes that are still in re-investment, while masking the lower returns of smaller accounts that are winding down.
Since re-investment has been stopped, it seems like this thread is essentially presenting the play-by-play that feeds "performance by vintage" charts like what @Fred93 had posted in a few threads, for example:
https://forum.lendacademy.com/index.php/topic,4113.msg40832.html#msg40832.
Has anyone with a more agile feel for these numbers gotten a sense of whether these results are basically consistent with what we'd expect for an account that is winding down (perhaps adjusted for the now-known poor quality of the last vintage purchased in this account)? It may not drive my decision-making, but I'd like to refine my expectations of what the eventual wind-down period will look like, and how long the account needs to exist in the re-investment state to cover the wind down costs and still meet my goals.
Is anyone doing good? I can't believe that every single investor is down.
I'm in the down but not out category. I'll still make money this year, just not nearly as much as last year. Sticking it out through next year to see how things go.
Interestingly I was talking about this with a friend earlier and I found an "Understanding your returns" chart I had screenshoted almost exactly a year ago. Only a slight diference...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQUr8yXu04&feature=youtu.beEdit: I must have had different options selected, but the different colors makes it easier to see so left it that way. Same idea.
Very neat video!
Here's an old screenshot of mine from 2 1/2 years ago, 4-20-2015 (i.e. the good old days).
Definitely more than a slight difference.
Interesting that by this time I had already purchased about 2/3 of the total number of notes ever owned (6,136 of 9,715).
This is the second anniversary of the LC "Worst Month Yet" thread. We need a birthday cake emoji.
They say time flies when you're having a good time, so it seems just like yesterday.
The thread pre-dated the LC scandal of May 2016 by 6 months so maybe it served as a canary in the coal mine for trouble ahead.
Little did I know how bad things would get. See the arrows on the charts indicating the start date of this thread.
The scandal probably saved me a lot of money on my investments in notes. I bought no notes between 5/21/2016 and 9/9/2016.
During that time I sold about half my notes on FolioFn and reduced my exposure to LC by half. My sales were quite profitable.
I count my blessings I didn't let it ride, though there were opinions shared here that those of us leaving at that time were panicking.
I think bugging out is why my losses now are very modest. They gotta be half what they would have been.
My biggest mistake was to begin reinvesting once again in D&E notes from 9/9 2016 until 1/24/17. DUH?? Why did I do that??
I invested in B only notes from 1/24/2017 and bought my last LC note on 2/27/2017.
As an parting gift this is now clearly the worst month yet (as a percent of principal invested thank goodness).
Now my principal invested is about equal to my profits over the years, and is maybe 20% of principal invested at the peak.
I could come back to LC as an investor but it would take a very big dose of Missouri (the "show-me" state) for that to happen.
So far I've made money this year, but barely! The account I manage that is mostly A/B has had a ~6% return this year. Amazing what a few EFGs will do to a boy's returns
I'm still drawing down. Taxable account is the earlier account and that may be one reason it has fared better. They were both pretty conservative but I *thought* my ROTH was even more conservative.
Back to another average down month. Total losses for the year were $986.56 and much less than they could have been.
Only good news was that I was able to move another $10k back over to SDIRA.
I finished with a negative return for the year on Both Lending Club and Prosper. Just terrible.
I finished the year positive a grand but my guess is after you account for the tax treatment and the payment fees I'm probably flat.
Yea don't forget that only 3k of your losses actually count as losses. If you're like me and earned 30k in interest but lost 33k to defaults then you'll be paying taxes on 27k of phantom earnings. Ridiculous.
Invested in LC and Prosper since early 2016... decided to take 1/20th of what I invested in p2p lending and put it in crypto in september. I have now made literally 100x the net profit in 3 months than I have in 2 years in p2p lending.
and its impossible to sell down the portfolio in any reasonable time frame.
im out.
Down to my last few notes. When I get those gone, I won't be back.
I continue to let my primary LC account wind down. I've lost money this year, but overall I'm still in the black since I started investing.
I've only got about 5k in my IRA account (luckily I only invested 1 year in the IRA). This account I will continue to reinvest and see what happens, more out of curiosity than anything else.
New month; new year; same old same old.
For the record I entered 2017 with $84.7k outstanding principal in notes owned and closed out the year with $34.0k (no Folio selling).
Lending Club is currently advertising "Solid Returns: 4 - 6%". I lost ($986.56) this year (and haven't had any of those "disowned" F and G loans for years).
Since May 2016 I've lost about 10% of the profits made before that time and the losses continue as you see.
I can only count my blessings that I started in 2013 and accumulated very significant profits before the party ended. Others were not so lucky.
Maybe the later vintages are better; I wouldn't know. I don't own any.
I'm right there with you. Lost $819 on ~100k invested last month.
Is anyone factoring recovery amounts (recover-recovery_fees) into their 'profits' --- it may make you feel better
I'm just taking the two recover related values from the monthly statements (2nd page).
See my highlighted column data for my example. I'm not getting rich by any stretch of the imagination.
Below is my taxable account that I am pulling money out of weekly. My ROTH IRA is doing similar (yes, I have one less column in that sheet
)
.
.
Yep, I've been including recoveries in my monthly profit / loss charts all along.
Recoveries are significant. For example my interest this month was $394.13 and recoveries were $146.19.
Think of it; my charged off loan recoveries were 37% of my total interest this month! Wow! Pretty unbelievable.
It's a sad commentary on the health of my loan portfolio as my charge offs were -($750.40), but I'll take what I can get.
Puts my loss this month at approximately $750 - $410 = $340 on $30k invested (about -13.6% annualized loss).
To be fair though, wouldn't it be safe to say you sold off all the best loans and are basically left with what didn't sell? Kind of skews the results.
I've been slowly backing down my amount and not reinvesting for a bit just to lower the account and on the 30k I have in there now with a 22 month average age still pulling a profit most months.
Graph of my taxable account recoveries-recover fees since I started. Curious that 02-2018 is the first February that I received recoveries. Note that on my taxable account that 2016 & 2017 I did not.
Taxable accountROTH IRA account
Box score for the month of February 2018. A little optimism in the delinquency chart!
But; largest charge offs as a percent of interest and largest loss as a percentage of principal invested yet.
So, I'm quietly optimistic this is the low water point (unless the real economy tanks). Thinking good thoughts.
Is it always darkest before the dawn; or before the lights go out completely?
PS: The annualized monthly profit/loss as a percent of principal invested chart is based on the month end principal invested.
That's unduly pessimistic. Obviously it's a bit better than that. I should have used the mean invested for the month.
Outstanding principal $30.5k invested at start of month and about $27.2k invested at end of month.
For the sake of consistency I won't change it now, but as the numbers get smaller the effect will get bigger.
As Yogi would say this month is deja vu all over again.
Same old same old.
All things equal I'd rather be making $50 per month rather than losing it.
My updated chart.
LC doing well last few months, but Prosper dropped into the toilet. Don't know why.
Orchard hasn't updated their index for April yet. I wonder if they're giving up, or just delayed.
As you can see from my Outstanding Principal chart above, the runoff decline in the amount of my invested principal has been slowing each month (in absolute dollars). Totally expected of course. However, I wondered the percentage of principal decline month to month, thinking it was slowing or perhaps flat. The chart below was a surprise to me. It seems that as a percent of principal invested the decline is and has been increasing each month as my account has wound down. I'm thinking the reason is that as my portfolio ages I am receiving more principal and less interest each month (per loan amortization). So, the higher your weighted average portfolio age the quicker it will run off (as a percent of principal invested of course). Taking it one step further, the higher your weighted average interest rate the quicker it will run off as well (with same caveat).
The next logical step was to take the "Using the % change in Outstanding Principal" data trend line to project my runoff into the future.
The chart is below:
By the end of the year I should receive another $10k, bringing the outstanding principal to around $7k.
Twelve months from now (6/2019) I should be down to $2,500 outstanding principal.
If Folio is still around I'll probably use it to sell all remaining notes by in the period 9/2019 - 12/2019.
All my notes are 36 month term and the term of the last note bought will end 2/2020.
Nice to have a plan. Will be interesting to see how well the projection holds up.
Four months later and the projection is tracking very nicely.
We'll see how that $7k at year's end projection holds up.
When Notes turn delinquent they take out a huge chunk of the money we have earned in the form of interest received on the good notes. We really struggle to get the good notes and when one of them tuns bad it negates all the hard work put in.
LC really needs to do a better job of going behind the defaulters. But then, why should they. Its not their hard earned money. its ours. Sorry I am ranting.
Still on track:
At the end of June projected run off to $7k outstanding principal at year end. Actual; $6,941.40.
Darn close.
A new scale for the New Year:
The predictability of your curve is a nice feature of this asset class.
Here's an update for February 2019. A bit more principal returned than expected; not a bad thing!
Maybe I'll be able to close out sooner than expected. We are getting down to very small amounts of principal invested.
Well this is pretty interesting and seems to support your theory that LC has become more aggressive.
There are probably other factors in play here too possibly involving my portfolio runoff and decreasing principal outstanding.
I dunno. Whatever the reason it's welcomed.
Mid-year report on my runoff; not quite under $2k. Slightly ahead of projection though (a good thing)
Nice! This week my account is finally down to under 100 notes, and the balance is less than $700. I should be all done by early 2020.
Last two years interest hasn't covered write-offs and YTD same has held true, but did have a couple of months in the black this year.
I'm down to 89 issued/current notes, but with run out, it'll be another two years before I'm done.
I can't totally complain, I've withdrawn more cash than I've put in now.
My combined return is 5.41% (I've bought/sold notes on folio, so it's the closest to a real return number I have).
In looking at the stats page, I guess I should be thankful for where I'm at with the 5.41% return. I'm just going to chalk it up to putting in a lot of good filters to find the few notes here or there that hadn't been gobbled up in 3 nanoseconds of being listed. Sticking with those filters when nothing good showed up. And then turning off the spigot once the bad news started flowing out of LC.
My weighted average interest rate is 15.85%, mostly 39% C's, 32% D's, and 21% E's.
Weighted average age of portfolio is now 49.1 months.
Sounds very familiar!
Sad to see everyone preparing to leave. It's been a fun ride
I am sorry to hear this. Yes, I think diversification is one of the most important factors to consider to reduce risks as this one.
It's time for a fire sale:
Only a little over $500 outstanding principal; considerably sooner than expected.
Higher charge offs than projected. I lost about $25 this month. Percentage wise it was truly the worst month ever, but money wise it was nothing.
Only about 250 notes now "un-dead". I should be able to blow them out on Folio manually and plan to discount them to whatever makes them go away.
About half are B grade so some decent bargains should pop up for the Folio Hawks. The rest are D's & E's; I'll probably have to give them away.
Fine with me; I just want to be done .. done before the end of the year.
Interesting read. Somehow I experienced better returns. Most of my loans are B and C. I started around 2015 with two accounts. One is a testing account that I used to test various of models; the other is my main account controlled by stable models after I feel comfortable with my models.
My main account has return about 5.6% and test account about 4.6%. I am starting to test secondary market models. I'll share some of my model predicted secondary loan prices later.
I don't know about Rob specifically, but a lot of posters used to chase yields and that caught up to them. My account of B and C notes that started at the beginning of the deterioration has performed fine. I reduced my taxable account to zero though. Got sick of dealing with taxes once my losses exceeded the deductible amount
Yes that is true if LC is viewed as fixed income. A lot of posters were investing here instead of equities, however.
My fire sale is mostly complete. I sold 200 notes mid-day Sunday. Anyone here buy any of them?
There were about 9 notes that were 31-120 late that I had to discount 95%. Who am I to argue with the market but that was a bit more than expected. I was thinking 85% - 90% would have been right.
95% discount of the principal is about right. Around 30% of late loans don't pay a penny.
Liquidity has value. In more active markets it's the called the bid-ask spread.
In my case I "hit the bid" so to speak and more than gladly paid the bidder for the liquidity provided.
The notes sold had from 1-4 payments remaining and I wanted to be rid of them now.
The bidder had a longer time horizon and will almost certainly profit from them (or from a "many like them" strategy applying law of large numbers).
I would have taken the other side of my trades, as did the buyer, if my own time horizon were longer.
I'm down to 26 notes on my Folio sell page. Of those 7 are run of the mill "in processing".
The remaining all show 0 payments remaining and less than $0.10 outstanding principal. Most show $0.00 outstanding principal.
Anyone know what's going on with them and how long it will take them to go away?
Wondering the same thing. I just sold the last note on two IRA's. One shows $0.00 principal outstanding and 11/9/19 was supposed to be the last payment, but it now shows another payment owing in December. Guessing some errant interest in the amount of something like $0.00032.
If a note has > $0.01 outstanding principal I can list it for $0.01 and it will be bought.
If a note has $0.01 outstanding principal I can list it but it will not be bought.
If a note has $0.00 outstanding principal I cannot even list it!
Why are there rules that prevent me from giving notes away for an asking price of $0.00 if I so choose?
Finally all done!
Savor the feeling of being done, but at the same time, mourn the loss. I always felt like there was a lot of lost potential that LC left on the table when they decided to make whatever changes were made. I've since moved on to Fundrise, and have never looked back. That was 2+ years ago.
The decision to leave was the right one for me and I regained so much time by doing so. They even recover their own losses. They had one go bad about a month ago and just announced that they were able to fully recover it on their own so the investors were made completely whole. When did we ever see that with LC?
As of 1/21/2020 I was notified by LC my account has been closed.
I can no longer log in. My account was active a tad under 7 years.
Bitter sweet! All things come to an end.
Felt the same way when mine closed.
One thing to be aware of that I've got going on right now. LC tells us that when our account is closed they will "periodically" send back any recoveries either via check or ACH to our primary bank account. I've got $25ish waiting right now to be sent- I know this because I've received several of the "We have notes matching your criteria" emails in the last few days.
Can't do anything about it since my account is closed. Can't initiate the ACH transfer myself.
Wondering when I'll get that $25 check or ACH. Or if I'll have to call them and yell at them to get it?
The joys of being a former LC member...
STRATA contains a ROTH IRA for me that is comprised of
a) the remaining $5K of LC notes and
b) Wunder Capital "notes" [which have turned out excellent but they no longer offer retail anymore as they got bigger and obtains $ from big investors].
This means I'll keep it open for several years.
I have a regular (1099-OID) LC account still too. Not sure that was worth it as takes took too much of the profit.
If I had a do-over I'd probably never bought 5 year LC notes and just stuck with 3 year so the unwinding was quicker.
Was fun and entertaining overall tho.
I am in the process of shutting down my SEP IRA this past week or so (~$240 cash in Strata, 69 charged off notes remain).
I spoke to Strata first and detailed my intentions of rolling (not direct transfer) the remaining cash and paying any fees with outside funds. They stated quite certainly that there would be just a $50 final account termination fee. I then spoke to Nate at LC. He sent me the Account Closure Request (Strata form tweaked with LC logo and allowing the premature distribution WITH exception (something that is omitted on Strata's form quite specifically.)) The LC form gives a breakdown of Strata fees which appears to be different than the original form I received when I opened the account. This form indicates account value < $10,000 fee of $50 and >= $10,000 fee of $150. I originally thought the closure was going to run me $200+. He also sent me a separate form for the transfer of the charged off notes to one of my taxable accounts. I have a total of six accounts (2 IRAs and 4 taxable). These will all be funneled down to one final account as a basket for all of the charged off notes.
If this plays out as described, total fees will run me $75. $25 from a direct partial transfer of $15,000 last year and then this $50 for the final rollover. Better than the $150 if I closed it all at once. Probably could have avoided the $25 last year if I did that as a rollover as well as Strata told me there was no fee for checks.
I just got a followup email from LC indicating they received the paperwork and it is in process...
"...Your documents have been received! We're currently reviewing them and we'll be sure to get back to you with any updates as soon as possible. Typically, the account closure and Note transfer process can take 2-3 weeks to be fully completed..."
Hopefully this IRA will be wrapped up by the end of Jan or first of Feb and will post back with the final results.
Folio is dead.
I finished liquidating my Lending Club investment "under the wire" by 8 months using Folio sales.
I'm thankful that I got it done in time (and it was only a matter of time). Turns out it was a good time to invest in stocks.
I'm not young (70), I don't feel old, but every day is a blessing.
Didn't want to potentially leave my heirs (my trustee) with 3 years of "stuck with it" and never invested in 5 year notes for the same reason.
There no doubt are others that are similarly inclined and will offer notes for sale at significant discounts just to be out.
IMO, bargains will be offered to those with the time horizon to accept them.