StartupEmpire conference | Nov 13th & 14th Toronto
I wanted to highlight an upcoming conference in Toronto aimed at startups and entrepreneurs. Its been organised by the irrepressible David Crow, and Jevon McDonald who have put together a great speakers list, including:
- Hugh Macleod
- Don Dodge
- Austin Hill
- and many others
Click through for details, and if the purpose, timing and location works then its one to think about.
They have just announced an innovative idea that will see the Blackberry Partners Fund provide $500K funding during the conference.
StartupEmpire | Startup Conference Toronto | Nov 13th & 14th
StartupNorth is Canada’s only grassroots conference for startups. Created for entrepreneurs and by entrepreneurs, StartupNorth aims to educate and inspire by connecting you with other entrepreneurs, mentors and the ecosystem of support needed to create and operate a successful startup in Canada and the world.
StartupNorth, the conference, is being produced by the team that has created StartupNorth.ca, DemoCamp, Founders & Funders, and and Startupindex.ca. StartupNorth.ca is Canada’s most popular community of web entrepreneurs and DemoCamp has been voted Toronto’s best “un-conference” and has been held in over 15 cities attracting over 10,000 individuals.
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed
Canadians are heavily into unsecured debt, and will go back to “old fashioned saving”
Good wake up piece here indicating the relative appetite for credit and in particular credit card and unsecured lines of credit in Canada vs the US. Not sure the numbers sound completely right, but the indication is that Canadians have relatively much more unsecured debt that Americans, and that might come as a surprise to [...]
Sept 2008 ROI 5.40%
Loan value of 4+ month late loans totals $553.00 an increase of $8.68 since last month, got to love Prosper accounting for bad loans. Slight improvement from last month $704.55 - $553.00 is $151.55. But then there are two loans in the 3 month late category that will flip over next month.
Prosper.com - 10/15/08 late loan stats update
Here's the october 15th, 2008 update to to my Prosper.com late loan statistics charts.
These charts show statistics for the performance of all prosper.com loans. Each curve represents the set of loans that were created in one calendar month. The vertical axis is the fraction of those loans that have "gone bad", in other words are 1 month late or worse (up to and including default). The horizontal axis is the observation date. All data comes from Prosper.com's performance web page.
A larger, more readable version of that chart can be found here
Here's a chart of the same data in which each curve has been slid to the left to a common origin. The horizontal axis is now days since loan origination month.
Explanation of methodology can be found in my prior postings in this blog.
These curves show loans that are >1 month late, however, you can read them as "default curves" because almost all Prosper.com loans that go 1 month late move on to default. See my discussion of Prosper's collections performance in earlier blog entries.
We continue to see horribly misleading newspaper and magazine articles saying that the default rate on Prosper loans is 3% or 4% or something like that. Investors can only make reasonable investment decisions after understanding the default behavior of Prosper.com loans. Prosper loans default at about 20% per year. You can clearly see this from the charts. Pick your favorite month. Look how high the curve has gone after the first year. About 20%, eh? Prosper loans default at about 20% per year, on the average, considering all Prosper loans. There is considerable variation from month to month. Look at the final chart, where the curves are slid to a common origin. Just look at the vertical line labelled 390 days. (That's 30 days after 360 days, because loan payments can't be 1 month late until you wait 30 days after.) You will see curves cross that line anywhere from 18% to 26%. (Some of the more recent months look like they will come in a little lower.) That's how many loans went bad in the first year. Pretty simple really. Journalists seem to get it wrong time after time. Somebody must be feedin' them bad info, eh? Perhaps they just copy bad data from each other.
At the time of this writing, prosper.com has shut down due to some not fully specified regulatory problem. Meanwhile, the ongoing loans still evolve, and the data is still available, so I will continue to update this charts.
PS: The best discussion among Prosper.com lenders can be found at http://prospers.org/
A strange month for the financial services industry; Social Lending is no exception
It’s been a strange month for the financial services industry as a whole and the burgeoning industry of Social Lending is no exception.
These last few weeks have seen a number of major announcements in the Social Lending space including the following:
Zopa US announced that it has restructured its operation in the US in collaboration with [...]
Prosper enters a ‘quiet period’ while seeking regulatory approvals
The pace of registration with regulatory authorities for social lending companys in North America continues to heat up. Following fast on the heels of the LendingClub announcement, Prosper have sent an email to members with this note that they are no longer accepting lender registrations, pending regulatory approvals.
Lending Club Reopens to Lenders while Prosper Shuts [...]
LendingClub announce registered broker dealer partnership
Lending Club have come out of their quiet period with an astounding announcement for themselves and social lending.
Lendingclub blog
Today, we’re delighted to announce that we have completed this process and are now available to both borrowers and lenders. We believe that this SEC registration is a major step forward for the Lending Club community [...]
Prosper Account Balances are FDIC Insured
While America becomes a nation of privatizing profits and socializing losses, Prosper account balances are FDIC insured.
The recent financial markets meltdowns are causing a global panic. If you are a Prosper lender, you can rest assured that your Prosper cash balances are FDIC insured.
Prosper itself is not a bank and does not take deposits but the funds that lenders keep with Prosper are held at Wells Fargo Bank which is FDIC insured.
Not so good news, and some great news | Zopa
It is a little sad that we see Zopa US close shop apparently following the participating Credit Unions inability to adequately fund the loans. We had always known the US Zopa was an entirely different model, with the Credit Unions being the sole lenders, and then the credit crisis came along. Nonetheless we will miss [...]
Unlike the US banks, Canadian banks hold back on dropping rates
The Canadian banks choose to rebel against the Government of Canada direction to reduce interest rates. The Central Bank dropped rates by a half percentage point indicating concern about the economy and in an attempt to ease credit. However the Canadian Banks are choosing to keep 50% of the drop for themselves. Story at the [...]