Year end review 2017

I don’t remember what my attitude toward Lending Club was at the beginning of 2017.  I must have had some concerns which prompted me to start some analysis in midyear. I restarted my blog posting in July to share my experiences and analysis.

Looking back, I wanted to find ways to salvage my account. So, I started with different approaches to acquiring notes. My first effort was to purchase some notes off the secondary market FOLIOfn. These were notes that had always paid on time and were set to be completed before the end of 2017 (these later became Test Case 1). The last of these were finished earlier this month. I purchased 139 notes and 133 were fully paid off. But surprisingly 6 were charged off. I invested a total of $1,704.50 and got back $1,723.70 for a profit of $19.20. This was a meager return of 1.1%. This was for a partial year, so generously annualizing to about 2.5% still doesn’t make this approach worthwhile.

I did have some other ideas over the summer and decided to test these approaches. I divided these into test cases and began documenting the results on this blog.  

By September I decided to liquidate all notes that would not pay out until 2021. This would allow me to let my account play out by 2020.  This wasn’t easy and took several months to accomplish. To insure I was completely done by the end of 2020 I’m currently liquidating notes ending in the last few months of that year.

Here are the updated test case results.

Description	Current	Other	Fully Paid	Charged Off	Index
Test 1 End in 2017	0%	1%	95%	4%	96.0
Test 2 End in 12 months	73%	0%	28%	0%	97.3
Test 3 LC Picks	92%	3%	5%	0%	98.8
Test 4 Zip Grade	95%	5%	0%	0%	98.8
Test 5 By Percent	90%	5%	5%	0%	95.2
Test 6 By Funded	95%	3%	3%	0%	99.3
Test 7 Random	93%	0%	8%	0%	98.2
Test 8 FOLIOfn Zip Grade	89%	0%	11%	0%	100.0

None of the test cases have had any charged off. Test cases 4 and 5 each have 2 that look problematic, while test case 6 has 1. Overall, it’s way too early to draw any conclusions. I’ll be updating this chart periodically.

I haven’t decided what to do with this blog in 2018. Lending Club updates will likely be few and far between. I might start sharing my analysis on one or both of my current passions, cryptocurrencies (Bitcoins) and wagering on sports. If anyone cares, let me know. You can follow me on Twitter, @billlanke.