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Timeless Money Tips
2007-09-09 21:29:00
Money magazine highlighted 20 top money tips (hat tip to Free Money Finance), and there's good wisdom in here for Prosper lenders. It's all worth a read, but here are a few that are most relevant: #1 Be Humble Money cites Confucius, "When you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it--this is knowledge.", as a reminder that you should accept that you don't know everything and to keep
More About: Money , Tips , Timeless , Mele

Forum Whomping Over Group Rewards
2007-09-07 22:49:00
After writing about Prosper's change in group leader rewards, I chanced a venture onto the forums to throw my thinking into a no holds barred environment. It'd be charitable to say that I got knocked around a bit. It starts with my post: The good groups help guide borrowers with help for their listing descriptions. I don't have hours to play back and forth with borrowers trying to sooth out the
More About: Forum , Rewards , Group , Reward

Group Rewards And Unintended Consequences
2007-09-06 16:34:00
In an e-mail to group leaders (see RateLadder and Prosper Lending Review), Prosper announced their intention to discontinue all group leader rewards and move to a referral-only reward structure. The prevailing attitude on the lender side can be summed up with this Prosper forum post: No group has added any value whatsoever. Repeat it with me: No group has added any value...oh, well at least to
More About: Rewards , Group , Consequences , Reward

Borrower Loan Status Reporting
2007-09-05 16:45:00
One of the things that came out of Prosper's latest upgrade (see this linkfest for details) was increased information about a borrower's previous loans. I stumbled on a listing for a multi-loaner and found the interface very useful. I got a screenshot of this random listing (for an unreferenced borrower with all the credit info erased to protect the innocent). This was a good example. Several
More About: Loan , Status

Higher Incomes And Lower Defaults
2007-09-04 20:23:00
In the Prosper Forums, Risk_Reward wrote on incomes versus default rates and that post contained some interesting nuggets. It has been widely known in credit circles that higher income decreases credit risk. One reference: Sexton D. E. (1977). On the other hand, credit default risk decreases when the income and age increase. According to Carling K., Jacobson T., and Roszbach K’s study,
More About: Lower , Higher

Brain Dump And Back At It
2007-09-04 20:05:00
I ended up taking the entire Labor Day weekend off from Prosper and blogging to spend some time with the wife and lil' one. As part of getting going again, here's a bit of brain clearing. I've got several different threads in my head for research topics. Through the series of posts on accessing Prosper's internal default calculations (part 1, part 2, part 3), I got access to some pretty cool
More About: Back , Brain

Linkfest
2007-08-31 16:04:00
Some more interesting reading stumbled upon by yours truely... Lies, damn lies, and statistics in PhD candidate publishes empirical analysis of Prosper: The results are certainly interesting. One thing that catches my eye is the homeowner determination. Based on Matt's analysis, homeowners are actually a greater risk of default than non-homeowners. Yet, according to the dataset Kumar used,

Concensus Ratings
2007-08-30 23:09:00
LendingStats' has started rating listings based on who's bid on them. A few people have inquired about how the “Consensus Rating” is being generated on the Listing Picker page under Lending Strategies. The idea behind the Listing Picker is to identify listings bid on by lenders who have good estimated ROIs. The more lenders with good ROIs the higher the consensus rating becomes. The formula
More About: Ratings , Census

Accessing Prosper's Performance Data Part 3
2007-08-30 16:31:00
This is the third post in a series on accessing Prosper's Marketplace Perform ance engine. Disclaimer: If you're not at least a bit geeky, this may bore you to tears. That's the danger of reading a blog run by an engineer. In the last two posts, I covered some of the various parameters that are accessible to crafty users and how to extract useful statistics from the webpages Prosper creates. In
More About: Data , Part , Part 3

Tanta On Troubled Borrowers
2007-08-29 19:26:00
Tanta over at Calculated Risk (I'm a huge fan) had a very appropriate commentary on borrowers who get in over their heads. I remain convinced that there's something wrong with blaming the financially inept for not realizing that they are financially inept, when those who are supposed to be financially ept--loan officers, brokers, financial counselors, advice columnists in business publications--
More About: Troubled , Bled

Accessing Prosper's Performance Data Part 2
2007-08-29 15:58:00
This is the second post in a series on accessing Prosper's Marketplace Perform ance engine. Disclaimer: If you're not at least a bit geeky, this will bore you to tears. That's the danger of reading a blog run by an engineer. This post, specifically, covers non-financial topics like programming. You've been warned. In the last post, I outlined how to get specific performance information from
More About: Data , Part

Accessing Prosper's Performance Data Part 1
2007-08-28 15:31:00
This is the first post in a series on accessing Prosper's Marketplace Perform ance engine. Disclaimer: If you're not at least a little geeky, this may bore you to tears. That's the danger of reading a blog run by an engineer. Prosper has been developing an API that developers can use to create 3rd party applications. It's progressing (slowly), but seriously lacking on capturing loan performance
More About: Data , Part

Prosper Pitching to E-Bay Sellers
2007-08-27 14:20:00
I was ready to call it a week and then I saw a post over at Money Smart Life that had a juicy tid-bid. Prosper hosted a workshops through E-Bay targeted toward small business financing. All the people selling random stuff on E-Bay, and Prosper's lenders are underwriting it Need a small business loan and not sure where to get it? Or, are you certain a loan is what you need? In this informative
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Latest Debt Sale
2007-08-25 16:59:00
The official announcement forum had the results from the latest debt sale: We completed a debt sale this week which will be evident in participating lender accounts over the next few business days. When a loan is sold, it is considered to be a default on the Prosper site and in the performance metrics. If one of your loans was sold, you will receive an email notifying you of the default and
More About: Sale , Debt

Prosper vs S&P 500: Apples To Apples Time
2007-08-24 20:37:00
Prosper sent out a marketing e-mail last night pitching the improved Prosper returns compared to the S&P500. Their blurb is below if you were somehow unlucky enough to miss out on it. ZCommodore was all over their disclaimers: First, they are comparing a year of returns on Prosper with 2 years on the S&P 500. The dates are different as well. I don't know what the returns looked like for the most
More About: Time , Prosper , Apples