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Member
The interest rates and ease of set up are the main attractions for P2P.
Website looks to be fixed now, placed an investment order for a secured loan. Lets see how long it takes to fill.
Does anyone know if there ahs been any marketing by Squirrel?
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Member
A newsletter just went out today, there are a few things in in im not so sure are good for investors - it sounds like they are going to artificially force interest rates for investors down - if this happens im out
"When there aren’t enough Investor bids in the Marketplace at a price that will allow a loan to settle we step in and fund the gap. "
"We’re making a small change to the the rates you can bid which will be active by the end of this week. "
"To resolve the issue of large rate fluctuations we're seeing, we're going to set a market clearing rate. Investor bids can only be placed 0.50% above or below this rate. The market clearing rate will increase or decrease gradually depending on the direction of bidding so rates will still move up and down but without getting influenced by outlier bids.
The benefit will be more competitive rates for creditworthy Borrowers (so they take up the loans) and more investment opportunities. The market rate for investors is going to be initially set at 8.00% which is where loans are currently being matched."
Originally Posted by unhuman
The interest rates and ease of set up are the main attractions for P2P.
Website looks to be fixed now, placed an investment order for a secured loan. Lets see how long it takes to fill.
Does anyone know if there ahs been any marketing by Squirrel?
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Member
They have changed it already
Minimum rate is 6%, maximum rate is 9%
Originally Posted by humvee
A newsletter just went out today, there are a few things in in im not so sure are good for investors - it sounds like they are going to artificially force interest rates for investors down - if this happens im out
"When there aren’t enough Investor bids in the Marketplace at a price that will allow a loan to settle we step in and fund the gap. "
"We’re making a small change to the the rates you can bid which will be active by the end of this week. "
"To resolve the issue of large rate fluctuations we're seeing, we're going to set a market clearing rate. Investor bids can only be placed 0.50% above or below this rate. The market clearing rate will increase or decrease gradually depending on the direction of bidding so rates will still move up and down but without getting influenced by outlier bids.
The benefit will be more competitive rates for creditworthy Borrowers (so they take up the loans) and more investment opportunities. The market rate for investors is going to be initially set at 8.00% which is where loans are currently being matched."
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Originally Posted by Valleytrader
Hey Saamee, how did you withdraw your funds? I've signed up and transferred some funds into Squirrel but cannot see the function where you can transfer funds back into your bank account. Do you have to contact them and request a transfer of funds?
SETTINGS > Click VIEW > On Call Account Tab > WITHDRAW
Rgds Saamee
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Member
Originally Posted by humvee
They have changed it already
Minimum rate is 6%, maximum rate is 9%
Im getting very close to walking away from squirrel.
Not only have they reduced the maximum interest rate for investors from the still advertised 12% to 9% - but when as a result of the reduced rate cannot get investors to in invest they are biding against investers at the lower rate then selling them back to investors at this reduced rate of return - making it look like this is the market is at when its not.
In the process of doing this they are preventing users from using fictionalization, I emailed them to ask why my 9% investment order had not been matched to any of the loans available at 9% on the market place currently. I don't have time to paraphrase so im just going to just copy paste below - they should not object since they seem to make it very clear that they believe that what is going on has been widely published already...... While i accept it has been published suspect alot of investors have not added all the little bits together to see the problems in the full picture.
Me: "HiCould you please check why my other order @9% for 2 years had not matched to either of the 2 x 2 year secured loans shown as available currently.
I then canceled and recreated the order by clicking on one of those 2 loans...... but still it did not appear to match up."
squirrel: "Hi Warwick, apologies there maybe some confusion about taking up those investments which we will put up some text around soon.
Those are investments which you need to fully fund if you are to take them. We can see you still have some other orders waiting to be filled – if you cancelled your orders you should have enough to fully fund that one available for $2k at 9%."
Me: "I thought the point was to be able to split across multiple loans to reduce risk. I was only looking to invest $500 in each loan or to each person.Will i still be able to take $500 of one of those loans when the remainder is filled?"
squirrel:"Hi Warwick I think we have discussed previously that our Loan Shield product actually helps reduce risk anyway so it doesn’t really matter whether all your money is in one loan and the borrower misses a payment or if its split into 5 loans and one borrower misses a repayment. There have been numerous newsletters sent out over the last few weeks to investors as well explaining this.
You have split your investments into $500 into each loan which is fine, as you will end up investing in separate loans however those ‘ready to go’ investments you can see on your dashboard need to be funded fully by a single user in order to be taken.
The loan itself already has been fully funded by Squirrel Money already as we have limited funds and are able to provide some liquidity on the platform, and already broken down into these smaller ‘chunks’. At this stage we cannot split these down further as we are also trying to encourage investors to invest larger amounts rather than smaller as that means their money isn’t sitting around doing nothing in the short term."
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Junior Member
That's interesting. Don't think u want to give 2k to one borrower.would rather split it across multiple borrowers.they say loan shield protects investors but that has its limitations, being only 4%? of the loan book. Seems very different model to harmoney.
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Member
The way I see it, spliting loans is not required as it doesn't matter which investor holds a loan gone bad as everyone else chips in to cover regardless of the size.
eg there is no difference between me having a 10k loan go bad and splitting that orginal loan 5k each with someone else and it going bad. Everyone else still will be covering the loan payments via loan sheild.
It's basically P2P socialism.
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Originally Posted by unhuman
It's basically P2P socialism.
That is my understanding of it. Also it is a self insurance scheme so if the fund is fully utilised, they make an additional call of all investors to rebuild the fund.
Returns seem good compared to a bank but Harmoney is providing a high return and the diversification should be beneficial since no insurance. Time will tell.
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JB here from Squirrel Money - jumping on this tread and happy to discuss any aspects of the platform. I'm busy so any replies by me might be a bit sporadic.
The platform is vastly different to Harmoney so appreciate we've still got a bit of a communication job to do explaining how the platform works.
Reserve Fund (Loan Shield)
It seems the Reserve Fund is now understood. Basically we build up provisions in the Reserve Fund for credit losses. Borrowers are still charged a risk-adjusted interest rate and it is the credit risk part of the rate that is passed up to reserves.
It's exactly the same way a bank does it and it maximises the risk-diversification benefit.
It does mean that the underlying loan's credit risk is irrelevant to investors and so you don't need to split up investments. The focus should be simply on rate and term. This is to make investing easy and quick.
We are currently reserving at around 4.00% against expected credit losses of 1.20% and an internal policy threshold of 2.00% so its conservative. Credit losses should be low right now, and nows not really the test. The real test is when the market deteriorates.
Investor Returns
Our returns might not be as good as Harmoney in the short term but they are more predictable.
Our borrowers will be getting better deals and we are staying away from the riskier end of the market. We are focused on high-quality lower risk borrowers and to make it simple for retail investors. If we can attract retail investors it will allow us to deliver lower borrowing costs.
I'll be upfront with you - we're about letting the market find its equilibrium. I think over time that will mean more investors and that will lower yields. What is the market return for a lower risk investment? Currently we are sitting around 8.50% for 5 years (but duration is around 3 years yes) which I think is too high. Over time that may drop to around 7.00% but only the market will decide that.
It is important to note that our platform margin does not penalise investors when borrowers repay early. This can have a significant impact on your return if a loan repays early. Equally if a borrower tops up their loan we do not repay the existing one.
As far as credit risk is concerned with the Reserve Fund there should not be any further call on investors for defaults (and if there was it would be socialised by shaving interest returns.) So our returns are net of defaults.
Setting the Market Rates
We under-estimated you guys at launch and thought the market would settle down quickly. What surprised us was that illiquidity meant the rates jumped around a lot and some investors were simply trying to game the platform at high rates - especially when you consider the underlying risk is low. It impacted on borrowers.
The way it works now is that Investors can only bid 0.50% above or below the market rate. If there is a shortage of funds in the system as there is now then investors can bid at the high end confidently and know their funds will be lent out. If there is a surplus of funds then the reverse is true.
We'll gradually dial up or down the market rate based on what is happening in the platform. We are going to hold the market rates until we have some volume in the platform and then use a 4-week moving average of the settled rates to determine the market rate.
Authentic Peer-to-Peer
We are not taking in any money from banks or investment bankers. Interestingly we could easily lend out over $500k a week at the moment but have dialled the tap back to tie it in to how quickly the investor funds are coming in. No point getting borrowers into the platform if we do not have sufficient funds to lend out.
To this effect we have an internal underwrite that allows us to settle loans quickly and pass them back to the "market" / investors.
We have already built a secondary market that will allow investors to sell their loans back to the platform (at face-value) but this is still to be signed off by the FMA in early 2016.
I'd be really interested in what else you guys would be keen to see?
Feedback welcomed.
Last edited by JB@Squirrel; 01-12-2015 at 08:18 PM.
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Hi Humvee,
We know we still have a bit of work to tidy up the bidding process. Its mostly sorted now with some good changes going through this week. We're now focusing on getting more information to investors as they are bidding so they have good visibility of what is available in the platform. This will be up in the next two weeks.
To be clear - we only fund loans in the platform when there is insufficient investor funds and we fund at the highest rate which is the upper end of the market price. We then pass those directly back to the market for investors to buy.
In your case above you were still in this fractioning mindset. You put two separate orders in for $500. If there were two 2 year loan awaiting rates then this would have worked fine. But there wasn't.
We'd already settled this loan at 9.00% and made it available back to the market. When we settle a loan and pass it back it needs to be funded in totality as we can't continue to split a loan in our system once it has settled.
We know we need to continue to improve how we present this to avoid any confusion so any feedback is appreciated.
Cheers, JB
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