Friday, September 14, 2012

Words with Lends

Today I'm pleased to announce an early version of some word-use analysis pages that I've created for all of the loans successfully funded on Lending Club.

For all words used 50 or more times in the loan title and description I've created a page at http://shoofile.com/loanwords/lendingclub/<word>.html where visitors can find out more information about loans that contain that word.

Here are some examples that I've covered on the blog previously:

Also I've added a special "word" for when the Loan Description is blank:
For any word that you'd like to test, you can do so by editing the URL to replace "<word>.html" with whichever word you're curious about.

There are over 2500 words used on Lending Club more than 50 times. For any that aren't used that often you'll get a Not Found error when you look for them.

If this proves popular enough, I'll keep improving the interface to add features like a summary page of the most-used words and a search-box to make finding words easier. I'll also add more details on how I've done the calculations, so that anyone interested can replicate my numbers.

For each topic, a loan is considered to have the word if it appears in the description or subject once or more. I am counting unique loans, so if the borrower wrote the word multiple times, the loan will still count only once. Here's what you get on each report:
  • The number of loans using the word per year.
  • The percent of loans in currently in each status by year.
  • The average grade of all loans containing the word.
  • Comparison charts, showing the average payback rate for each loan letter compared to the average payback rate of loans with this word.
For these charts I defined payback rate as: (Paid, Current loans) / (All Loans Except for those with the status Issued)

Update, Sept. 16: I have added an index page to the site here.

2 comments:

  1. This is very handy. Thank you for doing this!

    I always look carefully at the description and title to see the level of "desperation" of the applicant.

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