# LendRisk Analytics · text edition

Independent market research on subprime credit: buy-here-pay-here and subprime auto lenders, the credit unions and banks that fund them, and the securitizations that carry the paper. Every figure is cited to a named public source or labeled synthetic, and the method is printed beside the number.

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## Articles

- [What the tape said: entry, not exit](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-entry-not-exit.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 16 · 2026-10-11. A borrower scored 661 to 780 reaches 60 days past due within two years 1.1% of the time at Ford and 29.3% of the time at Santander. Once any borrower is 60 days down, almost every lender charges off at the same rate. Entry into distress is where subprime risk lives; exit is close to a constant. Counted from 907,334 loans in the public ABS-EE tapes.
- [What the tape said: the bottom moved more](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-set-at-signing.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 15 · 2026-10-05. Used cars are worth a third more than before the pandemic and subprime lenders recover eleven points less on them. The averages hide why. Fifty thousand repossessions from the public loan tapes, split by the year each contract was written: the cohorts that make up nearly all of what is being repossessed are recovering less than a year ago, and the index only looks flat because newer paper is replacing older. Every figure computed from the raw filings.
- [What the tape said: modified, and not paying](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-modified-and-not-paying.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 14 · 2026-09-15. Every federally insured credit union files one line for loans it has modified for borrowers in trouble, and since 2024 a second line for the modified loans that are already late again. The first has more than doubled since the definition changed. One dollar in four on it is not paying. What the line says about next year's charge-offs, where it says nothing, and who leaves it blank. Every figure rebuilt from the raw NCUA archives; inferences labeled.
- [What the tape said: current, on tape](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-current-on-tape.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 13 · 2026-09-13. Fourteen auto lenders, forty-four securitizations, 1.15 million loans on their latest monthly tapes. Every one of them grants payment extensions, and every extension turns a past-due account current. Reported 60+ delinquency against the same figure with recently extended loans added back, lender by lender, with what happened to those loans six months later. Every figure recomputed from the filed loan-level records; inferences labeled.
- [What the tape said: the lot behind the branch](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-the-lot-behind-the-branch.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 12 · 2026-08-31. One line on the NCUA call report counts cars already repossessed and not yet sold. Roughly seven in ten credit unions leave it blank. Across eleven consecutive annual cohorts, the institutions filling it in charged off more the following year, every time. Every figure recomputed from the raw filings; inferences labeled.
- [Past due, unchanged](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-past-due-unchanged.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 11. Eleven buy-here-pay-here stores, thirty months of real monthly numbers. The share of customers behind held steady. What each dollar of loss cost in interest moved, bottomed in late 2025, and is climbing back. What these operators did about it.
- [What the tape said: the one-way door](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-the-one-way-door.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 10 · 2026-08-23. Credit unions began securitizing their own loans in November 2019. Twenty-five deals and roughly $8.4 billion later, the dollars are still small. The structure is not. Why a funding tool adopted under liquidity stress has not been retired now that the stress has eased. Every figure sourced; inferences labeled.
- [The cash problem](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-the-cash-problem.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 9 · 2026-08-17. In buy-here-pay-here, cash leaves the day you sell the car and comes back over four to five years. Seven failures from 2023 to 2026, re-read as cash events: American Car Center, U.S. Auto Sales, Tricolor, PrimaLend, Automotive Credit, FinBe, and America's Car-Mart. Every figure sourced; inferences labeled.
- [What the tape said: current, on paper](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-current-on-paper.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 8 · 2026-08-09. An account gets an extension. The past-due clock resets. The tape shows current. Nothing about the borrower has changed. Where that gap lives in the SEC record, what the Philadelphia Fed found, and the disclosure failure that cost America's Car-Mart a non-reliance finding. Every figure sourced; inferences labeled.
- [What the tape said: the future of subprime](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-the-future-of-subprime.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 7 · 2026-08-08. A forward read on subprime auto. Severity has moved into origination and become forecastable, the industry benchmark is dissolving under composition drift, and the verification layer will be built by a rating agency, a consortium or a vendor. What each outcome costs the operators being measured. Every figure sourced; inferences labeled.
- [What the tape said: three stress cycles, one missing layer](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-three-cycles-one-missing-layer.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 6 · 2026-08-07. A deep study of the U.S. macroeconomy and subprime auto across 1997-98, 2008-09, and 2022-26. Three macro regimes, the same three causes of death, and the measurement layer the sector was told to build in 1998 and still has not. Every figure sourced; inferences labeled.
- [What the tape said: Tricolor, PrimaLend, Car-Mart](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-three-failures-one-blind-spot.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 5 · 2026-08-03. Three subprime auto lenders failed or nearly failed in nine months, funded by JPMorgan, Fifth Third, Barclays, CIBC and Silver Point. A comparative postmortem on what each institution actually missed, and why the answer is different in all three cases. Every figure sourced; inferences labeled.
- [What the tape said: Credit Acceptance (CACC)](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-cacc-stress-signals.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 4 · 2026-05-05. A stress-signal snapshot on Credit Acceptance: an 8.2-point forecast miss on the 2022 vintage, the worst in a decade, against ABS funding costs that fell from 8.6% to 5.1% over the same two years. Deterioration and stabilization, read from the same tape. Every figure sourced; inferences labeled.
- [What the tape said: America's Car-Mart](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-carmart-stress-signals.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 3 · 2026-07-03. A read of what is publicly visible about America's Car-Mart right now: a $300M distressed-fund term loan, a June 2026 forbearance covering five simultaneous covenant defaults, an $18M waiver fee, and 66 days on the clock. The credit book was improving; the funding architecture is what broke. Straight from the filings.
- [What the tape said: CarMax Auto Finance](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-carmax-stress-signals.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 2 · 2026-06-17. A read of what is publicly visible about CarMax Auto Finance right now: a $71.3M lifetime-loss revision on 2022 and 2023 vintages, an allowance that climbed after management called the peak, and a nonprime shelf whose structure is quietly tightening. Straight from the filings, with every figure sourced.
- [What the tape said: Tricolor Holdings](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-tricolor-tape.md) · What the Tape Said, Issue 1 · 2025-09-10. A post-mortem on what was publicly visible about Tricolor Holdings before its September 2025 collapse: funding dependence, a thin-file collateral pool (62% no credit score in the final deal), and diligence blind spots, read straight from the public filings.
- [The waiting tax: the most expensive repo is the one you didn't make](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-the-waiting-tax.md) · Servicing. In deep subprime, the largest controllable loss isn't the auction price. It's the recovery you forfeit by hesitating, because the odds of getting the car back collapse far faster than the car depreciates.
- [Buy-here-pay-here grew up](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-bhph-institutionalized.md) · Sector note. BHPH used to be cash-funded and self-insured. The Federal Reserve's 2026 data shows it is now a bank-financed, guarantor-backed asset class, and institutionalization imports finance-company fragility into a segment that used to absorb its own losses.
- [Early payment default isn't a credit event. It's a fraud signal.](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-early-payment-default.md) · Underwriting. In deep subprime, a loan that defaults in the first three payments rarely went bad. It started bad. EPD is the fingerprint of misrepresentation at origination, and it clusters in a handful of dealers.
- [Run the book: a tool-by-tool teardown](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-run-the-book.md) · Case study. One blinded $40M subprime auto book, run through all six LendRisk Analytics tools in sequence. Every input, every output, every decision, from 'you look compliant' to a covenant breach six months out, the three dealers causing it, the deal to decline, and the next bad dealer stopped at the door.
- [Anatomy of a toxic book: how an average-looking portfolio hides a covenant breach](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-toxic-book.md) · Case study. A blinded case study. The aggregate said compliant. Attribution said six months to a covenant breach. How three dealers and one vintage nearly swept a $40M warehouse line, and how the slope was visible before the damage.
- [What the Tricolor collapse actually says about deep subprime auto](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-tricolor.md) · Teardown. Roll rates were inside covenant the quarter Tricolor failed. The warehouse banks did not miss a number, they missed a slope.
- [Roll rate analysis: how delinquency migration actually works](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-roll-rates.md) · Methodology. A plain English walk through transition matrices, why warehouse banks know your 90 day DPD before you do, and how to build the same view yourself.
- [BHPH charge offs in 2026: what normal actually looks like](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-bhph-normal.md) · Sector note. A 20 percent annual charge off rate is normal for a properly priced BHPH book. The operators going under are the ones whose recovery model assumed 2021 vehicle prices.
- [Subprime 60+ DPD hits 6.90% in Q1 2026](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-q1-2026-dpd.md) · Market analysis. Eighteen consecutive quarters of deterioration. The aggregate number is not what should worry you. The shape of the vintage curves underneath it is.
- [The Negative Equity Machine](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-negative-equity-machine.md) · Page. The 32-year subprime delinquency record is being read as a borrower-quality problem. The data says it is a loan-structure problem: negative equity underwritten into 77-month loans on collateral that depreciates faster than the note amortizes.
- [The credit strength Washington is trying to outlaw](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/insights-repossession-liability-turn.md) · Original analysis · 2026-07-10. The Fed's May 2026 BHPH note treats a 16.63x-higher repossession rate as a credit strength, faster recovery, lower loss-given-default, and $2B+ of bank commitments rated lower risk. Warren's February probe treats the same act as consumer harm. Both readings cannot hold. What happens to the banks' LGD assumption when the regulatory cost of repossession rises.

## Methods, tools and data

- [LendRisk Analytics · Independent research on subprime credit](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/about.md). Independent market research on subprime auto and buy-here-pay-here credit. The What the Tape Said series, post-mortems on the lenders that failed, method notes and benchmarks, every figure read from the public record.
- [Reading a loan tape: vintage curves, aging, and attribution](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/analyze.md). How a loan-level CSV becomes a portfolio read: static-pool vintage loss curves, delinquency aging, dealer attribution, and concentration screens, with the formulas, thresholds, and column vocabulary written out in the open.
- [Articles](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/articles.md). Plain English analysis on auto credit performance, vintage loss curves, dealer attribution, covenant monitoring, and market stress.
- [The Borrowing-Base Certificate · Lender-Side Market Brief](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/borrowing-base-lender.md). Tricolor's warehouse lenders had every standard structural protection and still lost roughly $370 million between two banks, because every protection sits downstream of a self-reported borrowing-base certificate. A market brief on the monitoring gap between field exams and the emerging practice of independent monthly recomputation of certificates from loan tapes. Independent research from the public record, not an audit, not advice.
- [The Borrowing-Base Certificate · Market Brief](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/borrowing-base.md). The monthly borrowing-base certificate is self-reported, and after Tricolor the banking system re-rated the entire BHPH sector because it cannot tell a clean certificate from a fabricated one. This market brief explains what changed, why it runs through one monthly document, and what independent verification of that document would have to look like. Independent market research from the public record, not an audit, not advice.
- [Covenant runway: the month the trigger breaks](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/covenant.md). The full arithmetic of covenant runway: project each metric linearly from its current level and monthly slope, and the first threshold crossed sets the headline. A method note on why the slope, not the snapshot, is the signal.
- [Data & sources](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/data.md). Every dataset, filing, and publication LendRisk Analytics draws on, government statistics, Federal Reserve research, ratings-agency data, industry reports, and public company disclosures. All public, none proprietary or loan-level.
- [Reading the dealer channel](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/dealers.md). A method note on scoring dealer channels in an indirect auto book: loss rate, severe lates, early payment default, and a volume-weighted composite health score, with the full weights, stress caps, and banding published and a worked synthetic example.
- [The segments carrying the loss](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/loss-drivers.md). A method note on segment-level loss attribution for direct auto books: the bin edges, flag thresholds, and cross-cut logic that show which credit bands, collateral profiles, terms, and geographies are carrying the net loss. Worked examples are synthetic.
- [Method & Data](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/method.md). How LendRisk Analytics builds its method notes and write-ups: where the data comes from, how the synthetic worked examples are constructed, the math behind every metric, and what is illustrative versus market-sourced.
- [The four levers of recovery, state by state](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/repo-map.md). A method note on the four state-law levers that decide what a defaulted auto loan returns: self-help repossession, right-to-cure notice, deficiency judgments, and wage garnishment. Includes the full scoring weights and how all fifty states and D.C. land.
- [Recovery decay: what a day of delay costs](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/repo-timing.md). A method note on repossession timing in BHPH and deep subprime: expected recovery equals vehicle value times the probability of custody, and the second term collapses far faster than the car depreciates. The full decay model, trigger ledger, and a worked synthetic table.
- [Sample Walkthrough · Direct Lender](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/sample-report-direct.md). A blinded direct-lender portfolio walkthrough. No dealers to blame, so loss attribution comes from the credit box itself: which FICO band, term, LTV, vehicle, affordability, and geography are eating the book. We find the slope, rank the segments, project the covenant breach, and tighten the box that stops it.
- [Sample Walkthrough](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/sample-report.md). A worked example on a synthetic $40M subprime auto book. It shows how to find the slope the aggregate hides, attribute it to three dealers, date it by vintage, and project the covenant breach. Illustrative analysis on made-up data, not a real portfolio.
- [When the term outlives the car](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/term-matcher.md). A method note on matching loan term to vehicle useful life: straight-line depreciation versus amortization, the negative-equity window, and why long terms on aged cars carry a structural path to default.
- [The composite read: three numbers against warehouse bands](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/tool.md). The full arithmetic of a three-input composite read for auto lending books: annualised loss rate, 90-plus-day delinquency, and weighted-average FICO scored 0-100 against standard warehouse covenant bands, with every threshold and weight published as a reference table.
- [Methods](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/tools.md). Ten plain-English method notes on how a subprime auto book gets read, vintage curves, covenant runway, recovery, dealer channel, plus worked examples on synthetic books. Independent market research.
- [The economics of a single deal](https://lendriskanalytics.com/text/underwriter.md). A method note on single-deal auto-loan economics: how probability of default, loss given default, expected loss, and lifetime ROA combine into a fund, counter, or decline read, with benchmark assumptions and a worked synthetic example.