Eric's Credit Community

Looks like my hosting provider decided to move my server to a new data center, which resulted in the site outage over the last couple days. Seems everything has been worked out though and we are back up and running.

And on a related note, I've been having a few issues with the data export from Prosper lately that has caused data updates to be a bit sporadic over the last couple weeks. I think I have them worked out at this point though, and I expect things to be updating normally again in a day or two.

Thanks for hanging in there and bearing with me! Lest everyone think I've been completely slacking off over the last few months, I have a few new reports and site updates to mention.

I just published the new Lates By Payment report. This report should give you an idea of how default risk changes as a loan ages. We would of course expect that as more and more on-time payments are made, the risk of a loan defaulting decreases. The information on this report should help to quantify that effect with real numbers. I'm especially excited about the possibilities this has for improving return estimates for portfolios and for pricing loans in a secondary market (such as the one LendingClub.com uses, or the one Prosper is rumored to be working on.)

Over the last couple months, I also put out a few other site changes that I've neglected to announce here (call me lazy I guess). Member pages now have an "Endorsements" tab so you can see who is endorsing whom, as well as endorsement history when endorsements are withdrawn. I've also updated the lates by age report to include a 30 month late category. We are finally getting close to actually having some "fully aged" 36 month loans out there! It's been a while, but I have a few updates here. First, I've added a Map function to the lender data screens that will show a kind of "heat map" for which states you are lending to. Not extremely useful, but a neat curiosity anyways. Second, I finally added a real blog to the site. I'll try to post there regularly to answer some of the frequently asked questions I see in my inbox as well as to opine on whatever else I might find interesting. Finally, there are a couple of bug fixes with this release, mostly related to a new "Pending Completion" listing status that Prosper rolled out recently. This has been causing some listings to fail to load, so that should be good for keeping things up-to-date. Check out the new Lender Return Distribution report to see a nice "big picture" view of how lenders are doing on Prosper. I've provided quite a few customization options on this one as well to allow you to slice-n-dice the data in many different ways. I apologize for the lack of data updates recently - apparently I had a misconfigured server that was causing the update process to fail. It should be fixed now though and all the data should be back up to date by tomorrow morning. You can now sign up to be notified when one of your borrowers tries to get a second loan. This is a feature that many of you have asked for ever since Prosper allowed borrowers to take out second loans before paying off their first one. All you need to do is sign in and check the Notify me when a borrower I've lent to asks for another loan. box on the My Account screen and you will automatically be notified within an hour or two after the borrower's loan request is posted on Prosper. Well, it's been almost 2 years now, and I've finally gotten around to re-vamping the look and feel for the site. As much as I enjoyed the craigslist-style simplicity of the old design, it was overdue for a bit of an update. You may notice that many of the page names on the site have changed as well, but any links you might have to the old pages should be redirected to the new ones automagically.

Along with the design update, I have a laundry list of improvements to the site as well:

• I've replaced the old "Find a lender" box with the new search bar you see under the tabs. You can now search for lenders, groups, or listings by title or borrower right from there.
• The Loan Search & Analysis tool now has a "lender" option to search for loans by lender. You can also do lender "What-if" searches from there, or you can follow the new links from a lender's loan and what if pages to view the loan and what-if analysis.
• The Group Promotion tool has been fixed. The previous version didn't work very well because of security precautions in most browsers that disallow cross-site scripting. The new code for that tool should resolve this.
• Lender signature image backgrounds are now transparent. Now they should blend in with the background color of the website you display them on rather than showing up as a white box.
• I've added the new Listing Category field to the Borrower Segments report. So, you can now see stats by listing category (personal loans, business loans, debt consolidation, etc.) All the data there is still pretty new though, so don't read too much into what you see there yet.
• I've improved the lender "what-if" screen to separate it out into multiple pages for larger lenders. It should also be significantly faster now as well.
• I've added a new Links area with links to a few other great p2p lending resources and blogs
• I've updated the Borrower Segments report to include average loan age for each segment. This should help with understanding the significance of the late rate figures there.

I'm sure I missed a few things in that list, but that should capture the majority of the changes for this release. Hope you enjoy the new site! Inspired by a report maintained manually by Prosper lender Fred93 I've created a new Loan Aging report. This report shows how loans from each month have performed after 6 months of aging. I'll be adding more options for customization on this report in the future as well. I've had a number of things in the works lately, most of them have been related to the behind-the-scenes data processing side of the site, so most of these changes will not be visible. There are a few notable things though:

• I am now consistently loading data from Prosper's new private data export. This means more accurate extended credit breakdown info on the lender pages and more accurate and up to date information in the borrower segments report.
• I've updated the calculation for the lender amount invested field to use a better method of estimating current loan values. This should result in much more accurate numbers there.
• The data load process for this site has been completely re-engineered which should result in much faster and more consistent updates to the data here.

For those of you that are also LendingClub lenders, I've just launched a new LendingClub stats site at www.lendingclubstats.com. Check it out when you get a chance and be sure to give feedback about what kind of reports you'd like to see over there. Well, the holidays are over, so it's time to get back to work! Lately I've been working on re-engineering the data update process for this site, which is why data updates and site availability have been a bit sporadic lately. This should be finished over the next couple weeks, so things should be returning to normal then. I've also been working on a new "secret project" that I'll be announcing here on Monday, so stay tuned for that!

A couple bug fixes to announce as well - The filter by origination date on the loan search screen should be working correctly now. I've also fixed an issue with the prosper bidding activity chart that was causing it to not load correctly. I just completed a new Borrower Segments report which is basicly a much more powerful version of the original Loans By Occupation report. Instead of just showing listing and loan performance by occupation, you can now view performance by one of 20 different fields. I've added some new charts to the lender summary pages that will show you the breakdown of a lender's portfolio by three of the key extended credit fields. This should give you a better idea of the risk profile for a portfolio than just the credit grade breakdown alone. I've created a new report, loans by occupation, showing how the occupation of a borrower affects their chances of funding as well as their default rate. This is the first report so far that is making use of the newly-available extended credit data.

Also, in response to Prosper's new feature allowing borrowers to take out more than one loan, I've modified the repeat borrowers report to include borrowers who have not yet paid off their current loan, but are going back for another one. I've just finished adding a new group watch list feature to the site. Similar to the lender watch list, you can now watch your favorite groups on Prosper and automatically receive notifications via e-mail within an hour or so of when they post a new listing. Just log in to your account, go to the My Account screen, and you should see the new "Group Watch" tab there. I've added a new listing detail page to the site. This will show you all the basic information for the listing along with discussion forum posts for the listing. If the listing was funded, it will also show some information about the loan including the current value and status history. You can view the listing page for any listing via the links from a member's loan page. I'll be working on switching over other pages that link directly to the listings on Prosper to link to this new page as well. Note that images and listing text may be missing for some older listings. I'll be loading that missing data over the next few days, so it should be there shortly. Looks like there was a bug in one of my data update programs that has caused most of the data on this site to not be updated for the past few days. My apologies for the inconvenience. To make it up to you, I've added a few neat new features to the site.

• I added a Current Listings tab to the group pages that will display that group's current listings in real time.
• I also added a Supporting Lenders tab to the group pages to show you which lenders are supporting a group, along with some data about those lenders.
• I've also updated the calculation of total amount loaned for lenders to use the new current loan balance data provided by Prosper. This should mean more accurate totals for most lenders (these figures should be updated by end of day on 8/28)

I've seen that many group leaders have an area on their site to display current listings for their group, but they often don't keep it regularly updated. So, I've created an AJAX based tool that you can simply copy-and-paste into your website to automatically display your group's current listings on your website. I have a number of other tools for group leaders planned as well, so if you have any suggestions, let me know!

Also, recent changes to the Prosper.com API have allowed me to make better matches between listings and loans. Instead of inferring the relationship from the data, Prosper is now providing that link. This means more accurate loan information for everybody!

I've made lots of small enhancements to the site over the last few days. Here are the highlights.

• New Prosper Listing Volume report that shows listing growth and funding percentages over time and can be filtered by credit grade as well.
• I updated the Lender Brackets chart to show both the lender count by bracket as well as the dollars invested by bracket.
• I've updated the lender summary pages, removed some of the more useless information and added a loan breakdown by status table at the bottom to give you a quick overview of the lender's portfolio. I also made some significant performance improvements to that screen. It should be much faster for large lenders now.
• I've added pagination to the lender loan pages to make things a bit faster for lenders with lots of loans. I also improved the sorting method when sorting by status and credit grade to put things in a more intuitive order.
• I updated the Prosper Bidding Activity screen to add a 14 day moving average to the chart. This should help smooth things out and make the overall bidding trends over time more obvious.

I've added a powerful new loan search tool to the site. This will allow you to search for loans using a myriad of different criteria and view performance data for that subset of loans.

Many people have asked for this for a long time now, so I've finally added a Group List feature with individual profile pages for every group on Prosper.

Much of the data on the profile pages is either data I've had for a while but never used or newly computed data, so be on the lookout for bugs. If you see anything suspicious in the data, let me know!

I've updated the member growth and loan growth pages to include month-by-month information as well. This should give you a better idea of the growth trends for Prosper.com

You may have seen my signature images on the Prosper.com forums but didn't know how to get one yourself. I've now added a screen that will allow you to generate the code for putting those images in your forum signature or on your website (It's on the Lender Stats menu). I've also added a new "mini-banner" format that complies with the forum policies on Prosper.com

Also, for group leaders, I've added the ability for you to receive notifications when a post is made on our forums about a loan in your group. You should see the new check box in the Email Options section of your My Account page when you log into the site.

I've been working on Fantasy Prosper on and off for about 6 months now and I've finally launched it as a public Beta. If you are interested in trying out lending on Prosper.com but don't want to put any money at risk yet, or you would like to try out some new lending ideas, check out FantasyProsper.com.

I've added some very powerful filtering and sorting capabilities to the Lenders By Amount Invested report as well as the Lenders By ROI and Diversified Lenders By ROI reports. This will allow you to cut down the data into smaller chunks and find what you are looking for more easily. As a matter of fact, all three of those reports are now really just one unified lender report with different default sorts and filters.

A few minor updates this time around. First, you'll notice that the tabs at the top of the site have been changed and dropdown menus have been added. This should make navigation a bit easier. Second, the group best funding charts have been updated with a dropdown to select the time period to use when calculating the best groups. This was suggested to make the results a bit more relevant to today, as some of the better groups are now inactive or have been closed to new members. Finally, the EricsCC ROI calculation should now take into account the 4+ month late loans correctly.

It's been a while since I made any major updates to the site worth noting here. My wife and I just had our 3rd child at the end of April, so the last couple months have been very busy. But now I'm back at it again with a new feature that many people have been requesting. If you log in to your account, you will see that you now have a "Lender Watch" tab. This replaces the old "Watch List" tab which is now unecessary since Prosper has implemented a watch list feature on the Prosper.com site. Using the Lender Watch, you can receive e-mail notifications when a lender you would like to watch places a bid. This is based on Prosper's new real-time API, so you will receive the notifications within about 15 minutes or so of the bid being placed.

Also, Prosper recently made some changes to the loan status classifications. The "3+ month late" category was removed, and a "3 month late" and "4+ month late" category were added. I've made some changes to the site to work with these new status codes, but the EricsCC ROI calculation doesn't seem to quite be taking them into account correctly yet. Expect that to be fixed shortly.

I added another graph to the Prosper Stats section called Prosper Bidding Activity. Basicly it shows how much people have been bidding on Prosper on a daily basis over the last 120 days. It also closes the books on the debate about the best day to close your listing - it's Thursday, no doubt about it.

• Prosper Lender List
• Listing Discussion Forum
• Borrower Segments
• Loan Search & Analysis
• Interest Rate History

• Loan Aging
• Borrower Segments