Owner: Prosperous Land URL:http://prosperousland.blogspot.com Join Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:42:28 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Keeping an eye on Prosper and peer to peer lending. Site statistics:Click here
Accessing Prosper's Performance Data Part 3 2007-08-30 09:31:00 This is the third post in a series on accessing Prosper's Marketplace Performance
engine. Disclaimer: If you're not at least a bit geeky, this may bore you to tears. That's the danger of reading a blog run by an engineer.
In the last two posts, I covered some of the various parameters that are accessible to crafty users and how to extract useful statistics from the webpages Prosper creates. In
Tanta On Troubled Borrowers 2007-08-29 12:26:00 Tanta over at Calculated Risk (I'm a huge fan) had a very appropriate commentary on borrowers who get in over their heads.
I remain convinced that there's something wrong with blaming the financially inept for not realizing that they are financially inept, when those who are supposed to be financially ept--loan officers, brokers, financial counselors, advice columnists in business publications--
Read more:Borrowers
Accessing Prosper's Performance Data Part 2 2007-08-29 08:58:00 This is the second post in a series on accessing Prosper's Marketplace Performance
engine. Disclaimer: If you're not at least a bit geeky, this will bore you to tears. That's the danger of reading a blog run by an engineer. This post, specifically, covers non-financial topics like programming. You've been warned.
In the last post, I outlined how to get specific performance information from
Accessing Prosper's Performance Data Part 1 2007-08-28 08:31:00 This is the first post in a series on accessing Prosper's Marketplace Performance
engine. Disclaimer: If you're not at least a little geeky, this may bore you to tears. That's the danger of reading a blog run by an engineer.
Prosper has been developing an API that developers can use to create 3rd party applications. It's progressing (slowly), but seriously lacking on capturing loan performance
Linkfest 2007-08-31 09:04:00 Some more interesting reading stumbled upon by yours truely...
Lies, damn lies, and statistics in PhD candidate publishes empirical analysis of Prosper:
The results are certainly interesting. One thing that catches my eye is the homeowner determination. Based on Matt's analysis, homeowners are actually a greater risk of default than non-homeowners. Yet, according to the dataset Kumar used,
The Next Forum Revolt Brewing Over Fraud 2007-09-26 17:32:00 It's looking like the next big forum uproar will be over Prosper's actions in the forums to stamp down the revelation of personally identifiable information (PII). Where does this information mostly come up? Why, when lenders go hunting for fraud. This has coalesed around a posting by Prosper Shira reinforcing Prosper's current PII position:
Members have done a terrific job helping Prosper
Read more:Forum
, Brewing
Implied Call Option In Prosper Loans 2007-09-26 12:48:00 Tanta over at Calculated Risk has gone off an obscure topic for mortgages, but it has relevance for Prosper lenders and borrowers. She had previously touched on the idea of an embedded option in a previous post, but really rounds it out here. From her A Clockwork Mortgage post:
... so suffice it to say that the main issue is the imbedded options in mortgage loans. In options theory terms, a
Read more:Loans
Prosper VP To Toughen Up On Late Payments? 2007-09-22 11:35:00 I completely missed this. Fortunately, Lending Stats didn't. From their September e-mail only newsletter:
Prosper Tackles Collections
Prosper is pleased to introduce our new VP of Operations, Doug Fuller. Doug brings 25 years of experience to the Prosper team and will be instrumental in helping our team crack down on delinquencies and ramp up our collections efforts. We are excited to have
Linkfest 2007-09-21 14:10:00 It's Friday and I've had a long week at the day job (hence, few posts), so now I'm just lazy. Let the linkfest begin...
Lending Club comes out:
This is it. The great moment we have been working towards: expanding Lending Club beyond Facebook and making it available to anyone out there looking for better rates. We continue to enhance and support our Lending Club application in Facebook, but now,
Studying The Lending Market Summary 2007-09-19 22:42:00 I've had a few days to ruminate over the Prosper's August lending market summary, and I've found a few items that are noteworthy. Specifically, their "Prosper Select" criteria and the top Prosper borrower states.
The Prosper Select criteria were listed in the fine print at the bottom of the release:
The Prosper Select Index return is the estimated average annual return on invested principal,
Read more:Lending
, Market
, Summary
New And Shiny Instant Transfer 2007-09-15 11:39:00 It was like magic. Just after I commented that Prosper should give lenders a hint about whether a bank transfer qualifies for the rapid transfer, it magically appears in an update two days later. It's not called rapid transfer anymore, though. It's called "Instant Transfer", but all the other good stuff I was looking for showed up.
The new interface for transferring funds calls out the dollar
Read more:Shiny
Prosper Growth And Usuary Laws 2007-09-13 16:14:00 As can be observed from my analysis of Prosper's August income, they need to do some growing if they intend to survive long term. Prosper's ability to expand it's lending has been limited by the various state usury laws that limit the interest rates that lenders can fetch. This has been highlighted by Prosper Lending Review's commentary on the Pennsylvania rate cap and one borrower's attempt to
Read more:Growth
Another Prosper Upgrade 2007-09-13 09:09:00 Prosper's performed their September upgrade last night. As someone named Andrew (Prosper Andrew perhaps?) commented in a previous post, the rapid transfer is now functional and will be called "Instant Transfer". Prosper's also implemented their much talked about changes to group rewards as well as some additional changes. From the announcement forum post:
Instant Transfers for Lenders
After
Prosper Monthly Market Summary 2007-09-12 13:55:00 Prosper has published their first monthly Peer to Peer Lending Market
summary. The market survey, surprisingly, covers just their own lending market. There's some interesting statistics that we'll digest in the next few days, but I want to highlight the market commentary provided by Chris Larson, CEO:
The market turmoil stemming from the ongoing credit crunch, subprime mortgage meltdown and
Read more:Summary
, Monthly
YALF - Yet Another Linkfest 2007-09-12 12:17:00 RateLadder spotted that Prosper Andrew requested a loan:
This is a $10,000 Loan that started at 15%. It is currently @ 7%. While I have every faith that Andrew will repay the loan. I have a hard time justifying the current rate. The highest yeilding 3 year CD is currently an APY 5.41% from Eloan. I will try to snipe $50 from my standing orders and bid $50 at 5.5%.
Prosper Lending Review
Rapid Transfer Behavior Confirmed 2007-09-11 12:47:00 A while back, I disclosed the rapid funds transfer criteria after a Prosper lending services rep was kind enough to tell me (that'll teach him). I can now confirmed that it works roughly as outlined. Some time after I passed $2500 in outstanding loan balances, I transfered $500 into my Prosper account. I got a notice that the money would be available in the usual 4 business days. Later that
Read more:Rapid
, Behavior
, Confirmed
How Prosper Gets Paid 2007-09-10 13:12:00 In addition to all the intricacies of being a lending on Prosper, I also think it's helpful to understand how Prosper makes it's money. After all, Prosper requires cash to pay it's employees and stay in business, and it's in the lender's best interest for Prosper to keep it's doors open. And, to make things more fun, they give us all the statistics necessary to determine their corporate income.
Timeless Money Tips 2007-09-09 14:29:00 Money magazine highlighted 20 top money tips (hat tip to Free Money Finance), and there's good wisdom in here for Prosper lenders. It's all worth a read, but here are a few that are most relevant:
#1 Be Humble
Money cites Confucius, "When you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it--this is knowledge.", as a reminder that you should accept that you don't know everything and to keep
Read more:Timeless
, Money
Forum Whomping Over Group Rewards 2007-09-07 15:49:00 After writing about Prosper's change in group leader rewards, I chanced a venture onto the forums to throw my thinking into a no holds barred environment. It'd be charitable to say that I got knocked around a bit. It starts with my post:
The good groups help guide borrowers with help for their listing descriptions. I don't have hours to play back and forth with borrowers trying to sooth out the
Read more:Forum
, Group
, Rewards
Group Rewards And Unintended Consequences 2007-09-06 09:34:00 In an e-mail to group leaders (see RateLadder and Prosper Lending Review), Prosper announced their intention to discontinue all group leader rewards and move to a referral-only reward structure. The prevailing attitude on the lender side can be summed up with this Prosper forum post:
No group has added any value whatsoever.
Repeat it with me: No group has added any value...oh, well at least to
Read more:Group
, Rewards
Borrower Loan Status Reporting 2007-09-05 09:45:00 One of the things that came out of Prosper's latest upgrade (see this linkfest for details) was increased information about a borrower's previous loans. I stumbled on a listing for a multi-loaner and found the interface very useful. I got a screenshot of this random listing (for an unreferenced borrower with all the credit info erased to protect the innocent).
This was a good example. Several
Read more:Borrower
, Status
, Reporting
Higher Incomes And Lower Defaults 2007-09-04 13:23:00 In the Prosper Forums, Risk_Reward wrote on incomes versus default rates and that post contained some interesting nuggets.
It has been widely known in credit circles that higher income decreases credit risk. One reference: Sexton D. E. (1977).
On the other hand, credit default risk decreases when the income
and age increase.
According to Carling K., Jacobson T., and Roszbach K’s study,
Read more:Higher
, Lower
, Defaults
Brain Dump And Back At It 2007-09-04 13:05:00 I ended up taking the entire Labor Day weekend off from Prosper and blogging to spend some time with the wife and lil' one. As part of getting going again, here's a bit of brain clearing.
I've got several different threads in my head for research topics. Through the series of posts on accessing Prosper's internal default calculations (part 1, part 2, part 3), I got access to some pretty cool
Read more:Brain
Loans From Groups Declining 2007-10-01 12:10:00 zcommodore has been monitoring the number of group loans funded vs non-group loans funded in response to Prosper's change in group rewards. A few weeks ago he noted that the ratio was swinging to non-groups:
Back in May/June when I first started checking, the number of "no group" listings at any point in time was around 60%*. After the removal of match rewards in early June along with a few
Read more:Loans
, Groups
Friday Linkfest Junket 2007-09-28 16:25:00 I've been having a linkfest every Friday
. Why stop now?
And on we go...
TechDumpster has a rundown on the (hypothetical) Zopa versus Prosper match-up:
Although Zopa is the only service of its kind in the United Kingdom,
when they do finally make it to the United States, they are going to
have to go head to head with Prosper. Here’s a quick breakdown of
the main differences between Zopa and
A Linkfest By Any Other Name Is Just As Lazy 2007-10-12 21:23:00 And into the links!
zcommodore, 36% Interest Rates?
There are rumors flying about new information provided by Chris Larsen at the Hawaii Meet & Greet that I mentioned in my last post. One of them is the possibility that Prosper will raise their rate caps to 36% from 30%.Personally, I think this is a bad idea. If you look at my previous blog post, you will see where I mention how
California Sliding Into Recession? 2007-10-12 07:09:00 I had previous considered California
as high-risker risk lending terrain due to housing conditions there. Calculated Risk has highlighted another reason to be careful:
Based on sales tax revenue, it now appears that the California economy is in recession.
The graph shows the September retail sales tax collections (and fiscal year through Sept) since 1998. The large decline in 2001 was related
Read more:Sliding
Notes From Prosper's Hawaii Meet & Greet 2007-10-11 12:48:00 Prosper's CEO Chris Larson participated in a meet & greet organized by Prosper member islandmele this last weekend. At the Honolulu, Hawaii
gathering, Chris (noted as CL) did comment on Prosper and answer a few questions from folks. islandmele was kind enough to post her notes from the weekend. Here's the highlight reel as interpreted by me. Go read the original to get it straight from the
Read more:Notes
PII Humor 2007-10-10 14:15:00 While there continues to be resentment about the shifting and sometimes ambiguous policies regarding personally identifiable information (PII), it's also become a humor generator for those who enjoy sarcasm and satire. Unfortunately for some, I'm one of those people. This listing and associated forum thread are worth a look, and the borrower Q&A is equally entertaining.
Buying Inventory -- A with
Read more:Humor
Prosper Poofs Potentially Powerful Features From Forum 2007-10-10 09:22:00 I have a love / hate view of the forums. For every insightful Q & A with Doug Fuller there's an equally frustrating flame war over personally identifiable information.
In the latest forum power struggle between the members and Prosper, Prosper has poofed their description of some upcoming features.
Because the post about our announcements at Finovate included some features that won't be
Read more:Forum
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