With all ongoing celebration of the shutdown and default, complemented by the local absurdity like BART and AC Transit strikes, it seems to be not the best moment to dump more of that hard-earned cash into the stock market – unless you are magically good at day trading, that is. So I finally decided to try out the Lending Club. Much has been said about them backed by Google Ventures, etc so there is plenty of background info elsewhere.

The biggest surprise, at least for today, was that there are only about 400 notes that show up in the unfiltered search. What’s worse, only 10% are lower-grade, which makes any kind of coherent filtering on the current set completely useless – there just aren’t enough notes to go around. Also, 40 lower-grade notes don’t exactly amount to a diverse portfolio, which becomes a bigger problem the lower in the grade you go. Since they claim 5000 loans listed in a week, apparently you have to fish daily for decent notes and add them as they come out.

Those new notes seem to be added daily in batches at 6am, 10am, 2pm and 6pm Pacific, with the biggest batch in the morning, and a combination of automated and manual trading quickly picks up the good ones. So you either have to script it, or check it around 6am precisely to have access to the best ones.

There is another pretty big and fundamental catch with investing there which I will cover in the next posts as I get data, so stay tuned!