Version 2.1.6: First change for Portfolio Plans

Of course just as soon as I release my first use of the bidding API, Prosper takes the entire API offline yesterday. Then the Performance Page is broken this morning.

The first change in this release is upon a quick bid my extension will no longer autorefresh. You must click the link as I described in the earlier post. I prefer to see that the status returned from the bid.

Second, I noticed this forum entry. It provides a workaround to be able to see the performance of a portfolio plan's performance. I hate workarounds! And this one is terrible.

So with this release, whenever you are on a saved search you will see a new link under the "Delete Saved Search" called "View Performance", look for the magic wand. For Portfolio Plans, follow the workaround, click Edit Criteria, then View Listings, then when the new window pops up (which is just a saved search), click View Performance.

Even if you do not use Portfolio Plans you can benefit from examining your saved search's performance.

Version 2.1.5: Quick bidding

Important update: You must send an email to APIServices@prosper.com asking to have your account enabled for API bidding. I think you have to send it from the email account that is associated with your Prosper account.

Personally I do not like the many pages that Prosper throws at you when you want to place bid. And as I have stated before I do not think the Estimated Loss is at all a relevant metric for placing a bid on a single listing. You can have an estimated loss based on an entire portfolio of listings, but not on a single listing (in my opinion). You can have an estimated chance of default, which is what I provide in the market analysis section.

Speaking of the Market Analysis... I have never found the Narrow selection useful. So I have modified. It now displays the same information as the Specific but minus the number of inquiries criteria. If you have a credit report with 0 inquiries the specific selection will find very few loans... use the Narrow to find more. Feedback is welcome.

My first public use of the new bidding by the API is included in this release. Back to my dislike of the many pages Prosper shows when you want to bid. I have now added a link, Place a quick bid. It provides a popup that allows you to specify the amount and the minimum interest rate, of course.

In order to use this feature you will have to login to the Prosper API. This login is separate from being logged into the website. Again I don't care about your email address or password. But if you want to use this feature you have to enter the values in a popup. It looks like this:

So click the place a quick bid link and you will be presented with this just once per session. Once successful, click the place a quick bid link again. Please note you cannot hit the enter key to sign in, you must click the button. You will then see this:


Please note, I do not validate the amount and bid rate fields. If you enter less than $50 a nice error message appears, if your interest rate is too high, you receive an okay error message. Both provided by Prosper. Now if you enter letters or other nonsense you get a less nice error.

Once the bid is successful, you will be presented with a message as well as an option to refresh the page, which I recommend you do so that you can see your bid like this. Note the bid type.


Also if you find this listing again on a search result it will correctly indicate your bid.

Enjoy.

New feature: API bidding

What does this mean? Well Prosper is now allowing to bid through API. I will be implementing a new application that works in conjunction with the current extension to IE. This new app will run as a Windows's service and place bids on listings you identify a few minutes prior to the listing end time. Thus ensuring that you will not be outbid, preventing your bid from causing the rate to bid down, keeping your money from being tied up for 7 days.

You will be able to specify your rate limits and amount to bid.

Now that you have read this, please go back to the Prosper forums and leave comments. I'm interested in how useful this feature would be.

Export your loan details

From the Your Account page, click View Recent Loans... only you won't be viewing just recent loans but all of your loans... I modify that link. Then on the resulting page I add a button called Export. When complete click View Export Link. The easist way to make the sample viewable is a PDF file... so click here. It will take time to download all of this data if you have a lot of loans. I have 4 pages worth and it takes around 5 minutes.

You will see principal and interest paid, and if necessary the loan amount collected from defaults. Not shown in the PDF is a rollup summary that calculates your ROI. I show two numbers, best case and current based on all lates defaulting as of right now. Basically the numbers have shown that 85% of the time a late becomes a default. So I take the worse case and say if it is late at any stage it is a default. One thing to note about this ROI calculation as well as all the others out there.. none of them can take into account the actual amount of money you have placed into Prosper. It is only based on the amount you have bid including re-investments... which in my case is a few thousand dollars higher than the amount I have actually invested. I prefer to examine my ROI based on my initial investment... so I change cell C1 to that amount.

Version 2.1.4: Default rates

Thanks to feedback I have modified the popup for the Broad, Narrow, and Specific Market Analysis to show two new data points... One is the average lender rate for Similar Loans. Of course if Specific is too specific the average lender rate may not be displayed. The second is to show the default rate. It looks like this.



Historically if a loan goes 1 month late it is at least 85% sure that it will default. So pessimistically if a loan is late at any stage, it counts against the default rate displayed.

The second change in this release is related to the Group performance summary. If a borrower is part of a group, in the Borrower Info section you can click the magic wand next to the group's name and a popup appears that displays the group's performance. It looks like this:



Old timers may recognize this group. The value for "Estimated ROI assuming all lates default" is the status of the group as of today. So if you had invested $50 in each of the 819 loans you would earn a -1.89%. This number is close. The Prosper API does not provide all the info for me to get the exact number. I do not have debt sales nor the exact month that a lender stopped paying. I actually think the number would be less.

Don't forget to check out my analysis of Prosper's member growth.

Overview of Features:

I thought it was time to create another overview of the features my extension provides. Basically, wherever you find a magic wand hover or click to learn more about that feature. Most features popup additional info.

In this blog, click the images to see them larger.



On a listing detail page you will notice two new sections of links.

• Hide: prevents the listing from showing up on search results


• Watch: add this borrower to my extension's favorite list. Watching a borrower allows for relists to show up on your favorites list


• Alert: if you use gmail you can easily receive email alerts as the listing approaches its ending time


• Notes: you can save notes about the borrower (not the listing) again great for relists or borrowers coming back for a 2nd loan

The Market Analysis is my favorite addition. These links all make use of Prosper's Marketplace performance page. I just plug in the relevant information to limit the search to similar loans. Typically I just click the magic wand on these to see the popup. If you want to see the full page, click on the broad, narrow, specific link to open a new window to Prosper's Marketplace performance page. Here is an example after clicking the Broad magic wand.



So much useful info here. First hover of (details) and it will tell you what criteria is used for this info. Very useful when you click on the Specific magic wand. This average interest rate is more reliable than the one Prosper gives, which is based on huge buckets. Mine is more relevant to the listing you are examining. On this popup I examine the percent of loans that are current. In this example it is 78.77%, that gives a 21.23% chance of defaulting. Historically 85% of loans that go 1 month late default. So I count any loan that is late at any point as defaulted.

I examine the broad and specific market analysis the most. I strive to only bid on listings that have a specific chance of defaulting less than 10%. Not shown, but this particular listing had a specific 19% chance of defaulting.

After examining the chance of defaulting, I will then click on Similar Loans. This opens a new window that shows all the loans that are defaulting that are similar to this listing. This gives you the opportunity, if you wish, to examine every loan to try and determine why it defaulted... and determine if your listing is like those and therefore has an increased chance of defaulting. Depending on the number of loans that are similar this page can take awhile to load... so often I will click it first then go back to the original listing and perform analysis, then go check the similar page.



The loans are displayed in descending origination date... most recent first. See all those magic wands... click on them... do not click on the listing link as this will open the listing in the browser, and the similar loans will have to be reloaded. I'll try and automatically open the listing in a new window. Back to the magic wands... they will display the listing description, the credit info, the borrower description... all in nice popups. For the credit info you have to provide your login information... don't worry I do not keep it. This is required to access the data through Prosper's API.

If you do this enough you will often see the lightning bolts... as I have said before... the lightning bolt increased your chance of getting burned... stay away from them.

Now start clicking on the magic wand next to the loan's credit info. You will quickly start to see trends.... does your listing match these? If so stay away.

There is just so much information in this page hopefully you will take the time to study and learn.

At the very top of the page is a link in big capital letters... VIEW ADDITIONAL INFO. Click it and you get something like this in a new window:

Loan Origination
Year.Month : Total : Late Loans
2006.04 : 2 : 1 : 50.00%
2006.05 : 2 : 2 : 100.00%
2006.07 : 1 : 0
2006.08 : 4 : 1 : 25.00%
2006.10 : 1 : 0
2006.11 : 4 : 1 : 25.00%
2006.12 : 4 : 0
2007.01 : 15 : 3 : 20.00%
2007.02 : 7 : 4 : 57.14%
2007.03 : 8 : 2 : 25.00%
2007.04 : 20 : 9 : 45.00%
2007.05 : 8 : 2 : 25.00%
2007.06 : 16 : 1 : 6.25%
2007.07 : 6 : 0
2007.08 : 8 : 1 : 12.50%
2007.09 : 14 : 3 : 21.43%
2007.10 : 7 : 1 : 14.29%
2007.11 : 19 : 0
2007.12 : 8 : 0
2008.01 : 11 : 0
Thru 2006.6 :4 : 3 : 75.00%
Thru 2006.12:12 : 5 : 41.67%
Thru 2007.6 :86 : 26 : 30.23%
Thru 2007.12:115 : 31 : 26.96%
Total :165 : 31 : 18.79%
Number of similar loans created in the past month: 7

Dates of significant change: Aug-2006 and Feb-2007
Additional credit info was added on these dates

Again you can learn a lot about this data. In this case not a lot of similar loans are created each month. You can see that the trend for the defaulting rate is rising. As you hopefully already know, as loans age the default rate increases. This page attempts to show you how drastic this trend is.

I have also added some quick links to useful information to the borrower info section on the listing detail page.



These next few features are vital to my analysis of the listing... sorry I have not uploaded images of these.

The wand next to the group name will popup a detailed list of this group's default success or failure... number of loans, etc. Click the wand next to the Q&As and you will see all of them, rather than just the first few. Click the wand next to the recent listings and you will see all of the listings... not just recent. Right click in the popup to view the prior listings... you can learn a lot by doing this!

In the Endorsements section I add a link called Verify Bids which will determine if the endorser's bid still stands. Typically GLs bid at the highest rate, get bid off... some even practice pump and dump... bid large, large amounts to attract attention.