Fred, you seem pretty savvy -- do you calculate vintage past due and loss curves? It may be more useful for you to spot trends
Sure. You can get such traditional curves on
www.insikt.com . Right now they haven't updated their database since Feb17, whereas the Apr17 files are now available. Other than that detail, they're fine.
Meanwhile, I've been charting loss (cumulative net chargeoff) a different way than the normal one. Usually people plot "vintage curves" with one curve for each vintage of loan, and a horizontal axis that represents months since start of loan. LC just published their April update, so I updated my chart.
{FYI: Vintage means a group of loans issued within a given quarter.}
I've turned the data around, with one curve for every age (ie months since start of loan), and a horizontal axis which represents vintage. If every vintage performed the same, then all these lines would be strictly horizontal.

These curves end at different vintages, because that's where time ends. In other words, 16Q3 loans haven't all reached 8 months age yet, so LC doesn't yet publish that number.
The curves are all tilting up toward the right end. This means that recent vintages are performing more poorly than prior vintages.
Another thing worth noticing is that the curves don't all have the same shape. In other words, chargeoffs at 6 months don't predict chargeoffs at 36 months very well. The early months give a hint, but you can't extrapolate very well. Things change. Perhaps economic conditions, seasonality, etc. Vintage is important, but it isn't everything.
Whether this way of looking at the data is more insightful than some other way is unclear to me. Each way of looking at the data allows you to see different things. Attributing the deteriorating performance to cause is more difficult in any case.