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Post by nickthefool on Aug 7, 2015 8:30:58 GMT
I played around with autobid last week, my question is does anyone here use it or find it to be any use? It seems fairly useless to me in its current form.
I didn't trust the simple settings as even at the maximum it tells me estimated average return is 7.6% after fees and defaults, which doesn't seem very attractive given that the average loans on the site equate to a little over 7%. It's also not really clear what it would do - if it's set at 12% does this mean it will bid at 12% on every loan regardless of band?
Anyway so I used the advanced settings at rates I'd be relatively happy with for each band. Thankfully I only gave it £100 to play with as it then bid on 5 loans, all with over 5 days to run on the auction. 2 of them ended up getting outbid, meaning my money was tied up for 4 days and didn't earn anything. I got a part in the other 3 loans, however they were all well over 1% lower than the highest rate available.
Is there a way to make autobid useful? I feel like in its present form, you either end up with money tied up and not earning a lot of the time or you'll get much lower rates than you could by being active. I had hoped it would treat the rate you specify as a minimum, i.e. repeatedly bidding at the highest available rate unless it goes below what you'd specified, and feel it would be much more useful in this form, although I guess that might increase the server load.
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adrianc
Member of DD Central
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Post by adrianc on Aug 7, 2015 8:37:07 GMT
Is there a way to make autobid useful? Depends on your definition of "useful", really. If you want a way to spread your money around loans, at a rate acceptable to you, with maximum diversity and minimal intervention, then - yes - it's useful. If you want to actively participate in getting the maximum return and minimum risk, then - no - it's not useful. Well, except that Autobodge's at-par-only SM purchasing is a great way for active investors to get shot of mildly dinged parts and (slowly) flip cashback-stripped property... <whistles innocently>
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Post by Deleted on Aug 7, 2015 8:56:48 GMT
I'm a very cautious investor in P2P and I only use it if; I'm going to be off net for a couple of weeks and I set the rate high for just A and A+. The result has been I have picked up a few deals I would have gone for manually and at least the rate I got more or less matched the higher risk I took on while keeping me invested.
I would say that is the only reason for using it. I don't want to be invested at any price, I want to be invested the right rate for the risk. Hope that helps.
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sl75
Posts: 2,092
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Post by sl75 on Aug 7, 2015 9:11:35 GMT
I played around with autobid last week, my question is does anyone here use it or find it to be any use? It seems fairly useless to me in its current form. I didn't trust the simple settings as even at the maximum it tells me estimated average return is 7.6% after fees and defaults, which doesn't seem very attractive given that the average loans on the site equate to a little over 7%. It's also not really clear what it would do - if it's set at 12% does this mean it will bid at 12% on every loan regardless of band? Anyway so I used the advanced settings at rates I'd be relatively happy with for each band. Thankfully I only gave it £100 to play with as it then bid on 5 loans, all with over 5 days to run on the auction. 2 of them ended up getting outbid, meaning my money was tied up for 4 days and didn't earn anything. I got a part in the other 3 loans, however they were all well over 1% lower than the highest rate available. Is there a way to make autobid useful? I feel like in its present form, you either end up with money tied up and not earning a lot of the time or you'll get much lower rates than you could by being active. I had hoped it would treat the rate you specify as a minimum, i.e. repeatedly bidding at the highest available rate unless it goes below what you'd specified, and feel it would be much more useful in this form, although I guess that might increase the server load. The way to make autobid useful is to have a life away from your computer. It'll then sit there bidding on every possible auction until it runs out of money, and then fairly swiftly finding a new home for each chunk of money when its outbid, or sufficient payments come in to allow for another bid, and allow you to get on with your life. To make it even more "useful", set the rate high enough that the speed at which loans are accepted including your selected rates matches the speed at which you are making new funds available for lending. The main thing that makes it less useful for me is that it will only bid a relatively large (0.5% of portfolio) chunk of money at a time. I'll typically enable it on my own account only when I'm flush with funds, and/or most auctions are filling and knocking the high rate I'd select for such a large bid quite quickly. Maybe one day FC will finally allow users to specify their own bid size for autobid, and then I'll keep it enabled all the time, doing an initial £20 marker bid on every auction that still includes my minimum rate to save me doing it manually... and maybe a larger "marker" bid of £100 or so at a slightly higher rate if I've got more money kicking around.
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Post by davee39 on Aug 7, 2015 11:16:02 GMT
Useful? Its brilliant!!
How else would I shift iffy loans at par?
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Post by ratrace on Aug 8, 2015 9:42:11 GMT
Am now using autobid to allow me to pick up loan parts in E band l would otherwise miss. Just set it on 18.2% in E band only to pick up loan parts in the fast moving E loans.
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fasty
Member of DD Central
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Post by fasty on Aug 8, 2015 10:04:06 GMT
Am now using autobid to allow me to pick up loan parts in E band l would otherwise miss. Just set it on 18.2% in E band only to pick up loan parts in the fast moving E loans. That's a very interesting concept, thanks. I wonder if the highly-trained autobid pixie is quicker off the mark than Baz's bid-bot?
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Post by ratrace on Aug 8, 2015 12:33:06 GMT
Am now using autobid to allow me to pick up loan parts in E band l would otherwise miss. Just set it on 18.2% in E band only to pick up loan parts in the fast moving E loans. That's a very interesting concept, thanks. I wonder if the highly-trained autobid pixie is quicker off the mark than Baz's bid-bot? lt should be. Because with 'Bidder Baz' he tends to go in high and then work his way down to 18.2%. Where if you go in with autobid at 18.2 right from the start, then it should give you an edge over Bidder Baz. Well that's the idea anyway, can't say for certain as l have only just started using autobid and so have only one loan from it so far.
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Post by goldservice on Aug 8, 2015 12:42:45 GMT
I suspect that Autobid may not often bid on E loans. The only evidence I have for this is that the spread of bid amounts for completed auctions is mainly £20 and £40, with a few £100, £300 etc. Where there are a few at £60, say, there are several for one lender. If AB was in there, I would not expect to see multiple bids from one lender. And I would expect to see more £60, £80 bids. I think that AB has a list of lenders to work through, and of loans to lend to, and each new loan will be added to the end of that list. E auctions will have finished before AB reaches them.
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SteveT
Member of DD Central
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Post by SteveT on Aug 8, 2015 12:51:06 GMT
I think the only Es that Autobid is likely to pick up are the very largest ones that stay available until the following day. Otherwise you'll have to hope that a new E appears just as it's your daily turn in the Autobid chair.
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Post by ratrace on Aug 8, 2015 13:12:37 GMT
Am not so sure you are right here guys. Because l would have thought the best way to set up autobid, would be to split the autobid money into the different risk bands. So when a loan turns up in one of the risk bands, it lets the autobid money get to work right away. Doing it this way means FC can make sure they get the maz lending speed for their autobidders. Which is very much in FC interests to do so as it helps to keep the autobidders happy.
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Post by GSV3MIaC on Aug 8, 2015 13:34:55 GMT
The default position for autobidders is 'don't look, don't care, might look at the APR numbers once in a blue moon' which is what FC would like. I agree with the other folks .. from looking at the E auction results, autobid had not even woken up on most of them before they were closed. I have suggested (several times) that FC ought run the autobid allocations before it puts the auction out for general release .. that way autobid WOULD have some utility (especially on popular loans, or fixed rate / Es, where the 'right' bid rate was obvious from the get go .. on real auctions, autobid will almost always buy too low, and we won't even talk about what it does on the SM).
Right now autobid seems to be a 'mostly overnight batch type function' (which is when repayments arrive, which is where a lot of autobid cash comes from). Faster than a bot? Nope, no chance (and several of the bots, or maybe they ARE mammals, are actually STARTING bidding at 18.2% on Es .. I was for the first 4 or 5 weeks, since that was always the 'right' answer.) I suppose one day we'll see an early-close E, but it'd have to be a big one, since the small ones hit MBR before the borrower would even have a chance to notice it is fully subscribed and pick up the phone to close it.
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Post by ratrace on Aug 8, 2015 21:06:06 GMT
Well it will do no harm to stick with it for the next few weeks to see how it pans out.
lf it gets me into E band loan parts that l would otherwise have missed out on. Then am going to be happy.
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Post by nickthefool on Aug 10, 2015 13:10:13 GMT
Thanks for the replies everyone. So the gist of it is that it's possibly useful if you're not going to be at your computer for a few days (and maybe if you want to try and get a part of a popular E loan), and useful from a selling point of view as you can get rid of loans at par.
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SteveT
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Post by SteveT on Aug 10, 2015 13:13:17 GMT
Thanks for the replies everyone. So the gist of it is that it's possibly useful if you're not going to be at your computer for a few days (and maybe if you want to try and get a part of a popular E loan), and useful from a selling point of view as you can get rid of loans at par. That latest E auction just filled in under 2 minutes, so I can't think Autobid is going to be much help there!
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