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Lending Club Adds 15 New Fields and Folio Introduces a True Secondary Market API

Lending Club investors will be happy to know that they have access to new filter criteria as well as the ability to automate buying and selling on the secondary market.

November 17, 2015 By Ryan Lichtenwald 4 Comments

Views: 1,009

Last week Lending Club announced they would be adding 15 new fields to their API. Investors who invest directly on LendingClub.com will see three of these fields on the browse notes page. For third parties who create credit models and individual investors who rely on their own backtesting to beat an index of loans this is great news. In addition, FOLIOfn has released an official API for secondary market trading. We review both of these developments below.

New Lending Club Fields

At a time when platforms have been increasingly protective over their data, Lending Club’s move to be more transparent is a welcome change. The three fields were made available November 11th, but the remaining will be added to the API and download notes file within the next month. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: data analytics, FOLIOfn, Lending Club, lendingrobot, NSR Invest, secondary market

Views: 1,009

Lending Club Rolls Out Enhanced Reporting Features for Foliofn Users

September 18, 2014 By Peter Renton 4 Comments

Views: 4

Today, Lending Club has added some long awaited features for investors who use the Lending Club trading platform to buy and sell notes. Until today many people who traded notes on Foliofn had no idea what their actual returns were – these were often mispriced by Lending Club’s NAR calculation. No more. If you have never bought or sold notes through Foliofn then these changes do not affect you.

Below is an explanation of these changes using my own main Lending Club (taxable) account as an example.

Primary Notes Return

Lending Club Primary Notes Return

This 10.85% number above represents the NAR return on all the notes that I have bought on the primary platform and not sold. These are now called Primary Notes. Any notes that were either bought or sold on Folio are excluded from this number.

When you click on the Understanding Your Returns link (underneath the NAR number) here you will go into the same screen as before with the dot-chart that plots similar investor returns.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: FOLIOfn, Lending Club, trading platform

Views: 4

Map of Available States for Lending Club and Prosper Investors

June 12, 2014 By Peter Renton 27 Comments

Views: 2,299

Unfortunately, not all states allow investors to participate in p2p lending. I have written about this situation before but the bottom line is that every state has its own securities laws and some are more strict than others.

New potential investors want to know this: Is my state approved for investing with Lending Club and/or Prosper? To answer that question definitively I decided to create an easy to read map that will show everyone their different options.

The Definitive Map for Investors in Lending Club and Prosper

We have scoured through the most up to date information at Lending Club and Prosper to create this map below. We have color coded the map to make it easy for you to see where your state stands. And you can zoom in and out easily as well as drag the map to see where the different states stand. You can also click on each state for a quick summary of what is approved. And if you want see a slightly larger map just click here.

State approvals by color
  • Lending Club & Prosper
  • Lending Club only
  • Prosper only
  • LC Foliofn only
  • Not approved

Explanation of the P2P Lending State Availability Map

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: available states, FOLIOfn, Lending Club, map, Prosper

Views: 2,299

Penny Notes: An Innovative Strategy for Lending Club Foliofn Investors

June 9, 2014 By Peter Renton 6 Comments

Views: 543

Penny Notes at Lending Club

[Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from New Jersey Guy, an active member of the Lend Academy Forum and investor on the Lending Club trading platform. He now lives in Florida and could invest on the Lending Club retail platform if he wanted, but he chooses not to – investing only through the trading platform still. In this, his second post, he gives some insight into one of the unique strategies he uses to invest. This article should not be considered investment advice – it is the personal opinion of the author of this guest post.]

Some of you are aware that I wrote the guest post  “Foliofn Users at Lending Club Are Not Second Class Citizens”.  Time flies, and that was now exactly one year ago!  I took some criticisms over one of the strategies that I called the “Penny Note Strategy”.  One forum member even referred to it as the “Toilet Note Strategy”.  He could have been right, but I decided to follow through with it any way.  I thought now would be a good time to report back to show you what has developed over the past 12 months.

Memory Refresher.  What is the “Penny Note” strategy?

Simple.  The Penny Note strategy is a very short-term strategy based on buying quality, seasoned notes with no more than 15 remaining payments.  This can only be done off of FOLIOfn.

I think Simon Cunningham of Lendingmemo best explained it in this post. He described a loan as having “Three Seasons” with the first season (the first 10 months) as having the highest odds of default.  The Final Season, as he describes “(are) months 18 and up, (which) has the most stable returns since the majority of loans that default would have done so.”

There is absolutely no research needed in picking these notes.  The Lending Club profiles that we rely on when picking new issues are totally obsolete.  Obviously, the borrower’s situation has most likely changed over the past 20 months making the profile worthless.  Therefore, there are only 4 factors used when choosing these notes.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: FOLIOfn, Lending Club, trading platform

Views: 543

Major Changes to the Lending Club Trading Platform Today

November 6, 2013 By Peter Renton 18 Comments

Views: 112

Many Lend Academy readers use the Foliofn trading platform (also called the secondary market) a lot. For some investors it is the only way that they can invest in Lending Club notes. After promising improvements for a long time Lending Club is finally rolling out some significant changes to the secondary market.

Some have already noticed one change that was rolled out a couple of weeks ago and this afternoon there were several more changes. This post will break them all down for you.

More Filters

Lending Club New Folio Filters

One of the big complaints that I (and many others) have had is that there are not enough filtering options on the trading platform. Right now you have basically three options: interest rate, loan status and number of remaining payments. That has changed with this update today as you can see in the screen shot above.

The Browse Notes section now includes five new filters:

  1. Original Loan Term
  2. Asking Price range
  3. Outstanding Principal range
  4. Yield To Maturity (YTM) range
  5. Markup/Discount range

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: FOLIOfn, Lending Club, secondary market, trading platform

Views: 112

Foliofn Users at Lending Club Are Not Second Class Citizens

June 13, 2013 By Peter Renton 27 Comments

Views: 2,140

[Editor’s Note: Today we have a guest post from New Jersey Guy – he is an active member of the Lend Academy Forum and investor on the Lending Club trading platform. In this post he provides his reasoning on why it is better to invest via Foliofn for Lending Club investors.]

Whether you’re new to Lending Club or already a seasoned investor, I’m sure you’ve already made one important discovery.  The Lending Club platform to invest in new loans is only available to just over HALF of our 50 states.  This leaves 24 states (including my state of New Jersey) dangling in the wind, left only with the secondary market as a means to invest in peer to peer lending.

Foliofn (or Folio for brevity’s sake) is the gateway to the secondary market.  Unfortunately, the platform is viewed as inferior and filled with notes (as one forum member put it) considered to be “the toiletries of loans.”  Stop here for a second.  On any given day, there are over 60,000 notes listed on Folio.  Look at that number again…..60,000!  That’s a lot of notes available for sale!  It’s a ton more than you’ll ever find for sale on the Lending Club Platform at a single time!  But again, they must all be poor performing notes that are not making payments and on the verge of default, right?  Well, as of this writing 56,000 of those notes are showing up as either freshly issued or current in their payments.  Only 4,500 notes are showing up as being over 30-days late.  Not quite the toilet as we were led to believe!

Granted, Folio is the market where investors will dump very poor performing notes.  However, ultra-conservative investors will dump perfectly good notes at the drop of a hat.  You know the old saying!  “What’s one mans garbage is another mans treasure!”  Yup, there’s treasure in there, and if you know how to mine Folio for it, you can create a portfolio that will rival any investor on Lending Club.  This article is going to show you different thoughts and ideas that aren’t available to Lending Club retail platform users. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: FOLIOfn, Lending Club, trading platform

Views: 2,140

To Sell or Not to Sell

January 18, 2013 By Peter Renton 19 Comments

Views: 892

Sell p2p notes on Foliofn

Both Lending Club and Prosper have had a trading platform for several years now. Some investors are very active users and sell notes on a regular basis whereas others never even register for the trading platform.

Selling Notes at Lending Club

At Lending Club investors have the flexibility to sell any note they own, as long as it isn’t in default. At any one time around 15% of the notes on Folio are for loans that are late. Many of these notes are discounted heavily and get picked up by those investors with a high risk tolerance.

That leaves 85% of the notes for sale on Folio that are now current. When I checked today that number was in excess of 44,000. Clearly a lot of people see value in putting their notes up for sale.

Selling Notes at Prosper

Prosper has a less vibrant secondary market because they don’t allow additional states like Lending Club does. They also do not allow lenders to sell late notes, which reduces the popularity of the platform. Sellers have a choice to sell their notes at a fixed price or with an auction model.

As of this writing there were just under 9,000 notes for sale (all of them current) on Prosper which is about 20% the size of number of current notes for sale at Lending Club. But there are plenty of buyers on Prosper as well particularly for notes priced at a discount.

Are you an active or passive investor?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: FOLIOfn, Lending Club, Prosper, selling notes

Views: 892

A Guide to Investing on Lending Club with FOLIOfn

January 11, 2013 By Peter Renton 21 Comments

Views: 2,098

Today we have a guest post from Sarah V., who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is only able to invest in Lending Club through the Folio platform something she has been doing for about eight months. She manages her own investments, does her own taxes with paper and pencil, and has had an interest in investing since she was a kid. She is a regular contributor on the Lend Academy forum.

Much has been written about Lending Club – statistical analysis, strategies, and the like. But some of us are living out in the wilderness, in “trading only” states where you can invest via FOLIOfn but not the Lending Club retail platform. If you’re in one of those states, this blog post is for you! [Editor’s note: the purple states in the map below are the Folio-only states.]

States Open to Lending Club Investors

I’ll put it bluntly: the FOLIOfn interface is terrible. It’s slow, and it’s missing an enormous amount of features it really should have. But it’s not impossible to use and sometimes, if you’re savvy enough, you can even use its clunkiness to your advantage.

Buying notes on Folio

There are a few schools of thought on how to use the FOLIOfn platform to buy notes:

  • Sort by markup/discount, thus finding the best deals.
  • Sort by yield to maturity to get the best bang for your buck. (Note: this option has recently been removed, but will hopefully come back soon.)
  • Simulate the retail platform experience by purchasing newly-issued notes, which you can find by clicking both the “Now Current” and “Never Late” notes and sorting by Loan ID number or Note ID number (highest first).
  • If you have a higher appetite for risk and you’re a very hands-on investor, you can make a lot of money by buying and selling distressed notes, heavily discounted notes, and late or grace-period notes.

The problem comes in when you realize that almost every note on FOLIOfn is there because someone decided they didn’t like it. Usually there is a reason they didn’t want it, and often that reason means you don’t want it either. This results in a lot of lousy notes that you have to look through to find the good ones. Here are a few things to look out for on the “Loan Performance” page: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: FOLIOfn, Interest Radar, Lending Club

Views: 2,098

P2P Summit is a New Tool for Lending Club Trading Platform Investors

November 2, 2012 By Peter Renton 6 Comments

Views: 4

3rd party tools for the Lending Club trading platform

We continue our weekly roundup of new tools for p2p lending investors with something a bit different. P2P Summit hasn’t launched yet but I have seen a preview of the site and I believe it has great potential.

Let’s be honest here, the Folio platform for Lending Club investors is more than a bit unwieldy. I am always surprised that so many investors stick with it and continue to buy notes there. The interface is unfriendly and the filtering capabilities pale in comparison to what is available to retail platform investors. That is why when I use the trading platform it is almost always as a seller, rarely a buyer. Of course, I realize that for many investors it is Folio or nothing when it comes to investing with Lending Club. For these people P2P Summit brings some good news.

For the first time investors will be able t0 filter notes on Folio just like retail investors. P2P Summit includes not just Folio data but also the credit data from the original borrower listing. You can search all the usual fields you have on Folio right now but also current FICO score, number of inquiries, revolving credit, employment data, verified income, etc. Once you have isolated the notes you want, you can invest in them with just one click from within P2P Summit.

Here is a screenshot of the filtering screen. Click on it to view the screen in full size. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Peer to Peer Lending Tagged With: FOLIOfn, Lending Club, p2p summit, trading platform

Views: 4

An Introduction to the Prosper Trading Platform

December 5, 2011 By Peter Renton 9 Comments

Views: 1,185

Last week I did an in depth review of the Lending Club trading platform and today we are going to turn our attention to Prosper.

There are many similarities between the two platforms but also some real differences. Prosper uses FOLIOfn to manage their trading platform which is the same company that Lending Club uses although the platforms are completely separate. If you have both a Lending Club and Prosper account you need to register separately for an account on FOLIOfn.

The biggest difference between Lending Club and Prosper’s approach to the trading platform is that Prosper only allows investors from the same states as the retail platform. Whereas Lending Club allows 17 additional states to invest via the trading platform Prosper does not allow any. You can only trade Prosper notes on FOLIOfn if you live in one of the 29 states that allow investors.

This big difference means that the market on Prosper is not quite as vibrant as Lending Club; there just aren’t as many buyers. There are usually somewhere around 5,000 notes for sale on the Prosper platform at any one time which is about one-third of the volume on Lending Club. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Investing/Lending Tagged With: FOLIOfn, Prosper

Views: 1,185

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ABOUT LENDIT FINTECH NEWS

LendIt Fintech News, Powered by Lend Academy, has been bringing you all the news and information about fintech and online lending since 2010 when it was founded by Peter Renton. We not only have the industry’s most active news site, but also the largest investor forum and the first and most popular podcast.

We are a team of fintech enthusiasts who have been covering the industry for many years. With a deep knowledge of online lending, digital banking, blockchain, artificial intelligence and more our team covers the daily news and writes in-depth editorials.

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