COVID Loan Tracker was started by small business owners Duncan and Rita MacDonald-Korth to help their fellow small business owners understand when PPP and EIDL advance money starts flowing. The site works by crowdsourcing knowledge on applications and loan disbursements. Our goal is to help the small business community and empower journalists with the data they need to keep the government accountable.

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We have been live just 56 hours and as of 8:00 am on April 11th nearly 2,000 businesses have reported about $1bn in loan applications. So far, 19 have reported receiving PPP loans and just 2 have reported receiving EIDL advances.

Here are some trends and macro data:

1. More Money is Flowing: There was a big pickup in PPP loan disbursement on April 10^th, this should give small business owners some hope!
2. Small Banks are Leading the Charge: all but one of the PPP loan recipients we have tracked applied through a small and regional bank
3. EIDL Advances are a Disaster: only 4 out of almost 2,000 have received the advance/grant, and the ones that did applied earlier and waited an average of over 19 days. The SBA promised these would be delivered in two days.
4. Companies Seem to be Getting the Full Amount Applied For: it is very early to draw any conclusions, but thus far all but one company has gotten 100% of the amount they applied for.

Data on the Companies Who Have Received PPP Loans:

COVID Loan Tracker, a site launched on April 8th to help small business owners track the progress of PPP and EIDL advance applications, has received a surge of responses. 1,100 American small business owners have given us details of their applications.

If you have not already, please fill out the survey here.

https://www.covidloantracker.com/

The aim of COVID Loan Tracker is to let small business owners know when PPP loans really start flowing, and to empower journalists with the data they need to help keep the government accountable.

So far, just six companies out of 1,100 report receiving PPP Loans. Their details are below.

1. LLC, Colorado, 155 employees, applied 4/5, received 4/7, received $1.6m, applied through small/regional bank, received 100% requested
2. S-Corp, Oklahoma, 1 employee, applied 4/2, received 4/9, received $20,700, applied through small/regional bank, received 100% requested
3. LLC, Texas, 38 employees, applied 4/3, received 4/9, received $244,000, applied through small/regional bank, received 100% requested
4. LLC, Utah, 2 employees, applied 4/3, received 4/9, received $7,200, applied through small/regional bank, received 24% requested
5. S-Corp, Arkansas, applied 4/3, received 4/9, received $49,900, applied through small/regional bank, received 100% requested
6. C-Corp, Michigan, applied 4/3, received 4/8, received $250,000, applied through small/regional bank, received 100% requested

Average time between application and payment is 5.3 days.

General Data:

0.5% report receiving PPP Loans
>0.3% report receiving EIDL advances
15,000 employees reportedly at risk from responding companies
36% LLCs
31% S-corps
84% applied for >$250,000
12% for between $250,000 and $1,000,000
4% applied for $1m or more
49% applied through small/regional banks
17% applied through JP Morgan Chase

Special ask: please help us filling out the survey about your application by sharing COVID Loan Tracker with your business network.

As many of you know, we started a site called COVID Loan Tracker yesterday to help small business owners track applications and loan issuance so they can know when money starts to flow.

FINSUM readers gave an enormous response with over 200 small business owners in our space filling out the survey. Overall , as of 7:30 am we have had 440 small businesses report on CTL in the first 18 hours, representing up to $650,000,000 in loan applications across 47 states. Below are the findings:

0% have received PPP loans (i.e. money actually deposited)

0% have received EDL grants (i.e. money actually deposited)

39% are LLCs

28% are S-corporations

Average PPP loan request: $427,000

Average employees per application: 14

96% of applications are for less than $50,000

18% applied for more than $250,000

2% applied for $1m or more

49% applied through small and/or regional banks

16% applied through JP Morgan Chase

The conclusion is that money is clearly not flowing yet (at least at any meaningful level). Please share CTL with your networks so we can aggregate more data to keep small business owners informed and empower the media with data to keep the government accountable.

(New York)

This is a dark day economically. New data is flowing in from many sources, and all of it is pointing to a severe decline in demand that seems ever more likely to push the US into a depression. Unemployment claims came in at another 6.6m this morning, meaning a total of 16.6m Americans have applied in the last three weeks. In other data, fuel and energy demand has fallen so far that it is now at 1960s level. Electricity usage has plummeted on the back of the sharp decline in industrial output.

FINSUM: Let’s do some rough calculations. The US workforce is about 164m people. We started this coronavirus lockdown with just under 4% unemployment, and have since added 16.6m people. By a rough calculation that means we likely have already hit 14% unemployment.

(New York)

This is a difficult time to be any kind of investor, but being one trying to get yields out of equities is particularly hard-bitten at the moment. Dividends are being cut left and right, so investors need to turn to other options, but much of fixed income looks very scary. That said “Quality yield is on sale”, according to a fund manager at Tocqueville Asset management who specializes in income investments. “Don’t ignore the rest of the capital structure”, says another fund manager at Socoro Asset Management. For instance, look for things like a JP Morgan Chase preferred security with a fixed coupon of 5% and yield-to-call of 7.72%, or Invesco’s Variable Rate Preferred ETF (VRP), yielding 4.85%.

FINSUM: These are good suggestions. For a yield that will really knock your socks off, take a look at the Virtus Private Credit Strategy ETF (VPC), which owns many BDCs and CEFs and has been beaten up in the selloff, but yields a whopping ~18% net of expenses.