I think it’s pretty easy to “bid snipe” which I don’t even think of as sniping. If you bid low enough, you can get the loan pretty easily. The hope is that everyone doesn’t catch on or the loan itself will drop quite a bit. I don’t really consider this sniping because it’s not like you lose the item completely as in Ebay at the last minute – there’s still ample opportunity to get “win” the loan, if you bid low enough (because there are multiple “winners”.)

The fractional pennies come from you just getting a fraction of the overall loan amount.

I don’t know about the write-up, but usually I do better than a 10.40% with a 25% DTI on a grade B score. I know that write-up infuences a lot of people, but I try to make enough diversified loans that the write-up doesn’t matter. I don’t want to get hustled by someone who is a good writer and steals pictures from the web. If I do get “hustled”, it’s by dumb bad luck.

For me, when I borrowed $1500 to jumpstart my Prosper lending career, it was pretty quick and painless to get a loan. I let it run for 10 days to get the most possible bidding action on my request. Also, the majority of the bidding happens on that final day, so it’s not really worth it to end a loan request early.

I’ve had a couple winning bids canceled because Prosper wasn’t able to get the paperwork done, and I currently have 11 winning bids “Pending Review” right now…some of which have been that way for almost a month now.