Nickel Steamroller 2.0

After months of work, we’d like to announce the beta release of NSR 2.0. This version of the platform is a joint effort between Rocco who runs Prosper Stats and myself. We decided to team up in June of 2013 after looking at our current offerings. Rocco brings a great deal of experience and talent to NSR, and for the first time Prosper is fully supported on NSR, feature for feature, thanks to his prodigious work.

New Features:

• Advanced loan filtering and analysis including “data drill downs”
• Loan inventory monitoring
• Unified back testing, active and Folio filtering
• Enhanced portfolio analyzer for both Lending Club and Prosper
• Expanded filter inputs for back testing
• Data aggregation from the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labor Statistics
• More Charts with the ability to overlay data from external sources
• Log in with your Google or Facebook account, or just use your email
• Prosper Expanded Credit Filters Support

Notable Changes

Email Notifications Will Go Away

This feature is used quite a bit; over 4K email alerts go out daily.  The utility of this service has declined with time as loan demand has increased.  Most notifications that go out are for loans that have already funded.  Email is no longer the preferable method for notification of new loans. We’ll gauge your response on this, but if you feel email notifications are a must, we may add them back. Our feeling though is that emails are not effective for investing in the loans you want. Additionally, most email services throttle email or enforce some quota.  We are hitting delivery rate limits when new loans are released. Switching to our own email servers may be a solution, but maintaining an email server is low on the list of enjoyable things to do.

Portfolio Analyzer Requires You to Log In

The original portfolio analyzer allowed you to upload your notes.csv file anonymously. We now require you to log in.  There’s nothing nefarious here, and signing up is simple and free.  To work with the new architecture portfolios are now stored in a database so we need to associate portfolios with an identifier to track who they belong to. Portfolios themselves contain no identifiable information, and they can be completely removed at anytime from NSR.  This is the only feature (except auto investing) that requires a log in; active listings, Folio data, charts, and all the back testing tools you can use as an anonymous user.

Estimated ROI for Active Listings

This is gone, but will be back after we discuss improvements to this.  Currently NSR only supported Lending Club. We’re going to expand this into Prosper as well. This will be top on our list of items to add after we complete our current development tasks for the final release.

ROI Calculations

NSR 1.0 used the method Lend Stats uses to calculate ROI. With NSR 2.0 we are using Prosper Stats’ approach .   The new system actually supports both ROI calculations, but the NSR 1.0 ROI is hidden from the result set. We’ll likely add an option to the “Results Options” tab on the back testing tool to allow you to select between the two.

Previously Late Loan Analysis

This is a Prosper Stats feature that is not yet ported, but will be.

Next Steps

Account Migration

NSR and ProsperStats are merging into one platform. As such, we have users on both systems. We don’t know the exact username or emails you used to sign up with the two systems to attempt to merge everything.  We’ve written migration scripts to move all of your filters from our existing system to the new system, but we will only this at your request.  We’ll have to do some digging to verify the accounts.  The easiest and fastest thing to do is simple recreate your filters on NSR 2.0 after your signup for a new account.

NSR 1.0 will remain active until we switch 2.0 from beta to release mode. The same is true for Prosper Stats. We’ll be feature complete in terms of the functionality offered by Prosper Stats and NSR 1.0, except for the changes noted above in “Notable Changes”.

The new beta site has replaced the main site located at http://hvst.co/1PzPsxK 

NSR 1.0 will be available at  http://hvst.co/1PzPs0I 

Links to NSR

Many websites link to NSR and Prosper Stats. We’re going to make every effort to support legacy links so that you don’t have to change a thing on your blogs/websites.  Since this is a completely new code base the URLs have changed. We’ll be watching logs for incorrect links and attempt to add support.

Be sure to follow @NSRInvesting for updates.