Not sure if there's an "official" Lending Club thread yet, but I thought we could talk about it a bit here.
Personally, I've got $4k in my account, and about $1450 issued so far. The rest is In Funding or waiting to be invested (about 10-15 notes a day hit my parameters). My account is about a month old, and I'm expecting my first payment in a week.
My friend and I devised a system using the heaps of useful data from here:
http://nickelsteamroller.com/lendingclub_return, along with
http://nickelsteamroller.com/lendingclub_invest which shows EST ROI of each note, and the # of backtests he has run with that loan's specific credit criteria.
Because NSR's backtests don't include everything (such as state, length of employment, revolving line utilization), we tried to build our filter using the parameters that AREN'T included in them. We don't want to limit our note selection or reduce our risk TOO much, so we didn't get too strict. Here is our "filter" (not all of this stuff can be filtered on NSR, so a few things have to be checked manually)
D-G grade loans only.All states are OK except NV, FL, and UT (everyone avoids CA, but it actually isn't that terrible when we look at only D-G loans historically)
Revolving Line Utilization - 0 - 90% (I am slightly more lenient on this, especially if loan purpose is Debt Consol or CC payoff)
>=1 year of employment. MMM and a lot of other LC investors filter to 4+ years (or other arbitrary number) of employment. The numbers say that for D-G grade loans, length of employment is fairly unimportant. In fact, 4 years of employment has historically shown the HIGHEST DEFAULT RATE [6.72% --258 loans] followed closely by <1 year employment [6.17% - 289 loans]. Since I feel that 4 years having the highest default rate is a coincidence, I've left it within my acceptable parameters.14%+ EST ROI (must have 100+ backtests)Can go down to 12% EST ROI if there are 1,000+ backtests.If you check out the data linked above you'll see why we picked these things (remember to select only D-G loans on the left hand side or it will skew the numbers, since we're ONLY even looking at D-G). The 100/1000 backtests are arbitrary numbers - we think they are sufficient numbers.
Obviously we have seen no returns yet on these parameters, but I'll keep this thread up to date on how things go. I'd like to hear about your LC experience... How much have you invested? What's your criteria? Do you use Nickel Steamroller and do you have filters set up? How have your returns been?