My quick eyeball suggests that things are getting better. Perhaps not enough of an improvement to sustain Prosper's viability, but better.
Here's a quick scanning technique for you guys trying to make sense out of that. Start with any line of interest at any point in time. To compare that line to a loans of the same age, while stepping backwards in time, move one month back and look at the "previous" color, comparing its absolute reading to the line you are currently looking at. So, for example, if I'm looking at the September 2007 line and want to see whether it is a quantum improvement over August, I'd look at September 2007 (currently at about 8% as of 2/01), shift back 1 month and scan for the peach line, which was at 10%. Yep, things are looking better.
After you get a general feel for the pattern your eye needs to move in, you can do these sort of comparisons really fast. Bottom line? The changes wrought since last April are nothing short of amazing -- it is like watching two different products. I'm thinking that is mostly a result of kicking out the HRs and rebalancing the risk pool as a result. There is another discontinuity between August and September although the magnitude is much less -- what went down then, again?
I'd also be really, really interested in seeing a graph like this in just a single borrower pool of interest, like "clean Ds"
