Lesson 2

Your Unfair Advantage

Banks won't sell to you. Here's how FIXnotes solved the access problem.

The Hard Truth

If you call a bank tomorrow and ask if they have non-performing notes for sale, they’ll tell you no.

It’s not that they don’t have them. They just don’t want to sell them to you.

That’s not cynicism. That’s how the market works. Banks sell their non-performing loans at best execution. They package tens — sometimes hundreds — of millions of dollars in loans into massive tapes and sell them to hedge funds that can wire nine figures with a phone call. Individual investors calling bank asset departments get stonewalled. Not because they’re unqualified — because the bank has no infrastructure to sell one loan at a time to someone they’ve never heard of.

Public retail note marketplaces? Picked over by insiders before most buyers even see them.

The system isn’t built for individual buyers. It’s built for institutions. If you’ve tried and been shut out, it’s not because you did something wrong. It’s because you were trying to play a game with rules designed to exclude you.

How We Solved It

We stopped trying to squeeze through the front door as a small buyer. Instead, we started buying the same institutional tapes the hedge funds buy — tens, sometimes hundreds of millions in unpaid principal balance. Not cherry-picking individual loans off public marketplaces. Acquiring the full portfolios that individual investors never see.

Then we did something the hedge funds don’t do: we broke those portfolios apart into individual deals. Single loans that an individual investor can evaluate, bid on, and close. One at a time.

We became the bridge between Wall Street and Main Street. That bridge is the FIXnotes marketplace. And the research tools behind it are available to you right now.

Wall Street$10M–$100M+ tapesHow banks sell — institutions only

FIXnotesBuys the full tapeBreaks it apart into single deals

YouOne note at a timeEvaluate, bid, and close at your price

Try It Yourself — 3 Quick Exercises

Don’t take my word for it. Open each tool below, do the exercise, then come back here for the next one. Takes about 5 minutes total.

Exercise 1: Find a Distressed Bank

Open NPL Explorer™. Type your state in the search bar. Find a bank with a non-performing loan ratio above 2% — that means more than 2% of their loans aren’t being paid. Look at the total dollar amount of those non-performing assets. You just identified a potential note seller using institutional-grade data that 99% of note investors don’t know exists.

Open NPL Explorer →

You’re on the free view — the top 25 institutions per table. Foundation members see the full rankings, 250 deep, on every table — and can drill into any single state’s lender-distress profile.

Exercise 2: Check the Market Pulse

Open the FIXnotes Market Index. Look at the current pricing line — where is the average NPL trading relative to unpaid principal balance? Now look at where it was 12–18 months ago. The gap between those two points is the pricing window I’ll explain in Step 4. You’re looking at the opportunity in real time.

Open the Market Index →

The index is free for everyone. Foundation members bid on the actual deals behind this line — live marketplace inventory priced by this market.

Exercise 3: Model a Loan Modification

Open the Loan Mod Planner. Imagine you bought a note with a $68,000 balance for $40,000 — the walkthrough deal you’ll analyze hands-on in Step 5. Set the current balance to $68,000, drop the rate to 4%, and extend the term to 360 months. Look at the monthly payment and your cash-on-cash return. You just modeled the same resolution path professional note investors use when negotiating with borrowers.

Open the Loan Mod Planner →

Free runs one scenario at a time. Foundation members compare four side-by-side and copy borrower-ready terms straight out of the tool.

What Just Changed

Five minutes ago you didn’t know how to identify a distressed bank. Now you can pull up any state and find one in 30 seconds. You didn’t know what market pricing looked like. Now you can read the index and spot the window. You couldn’t model a loan mod. Now you can run scenarios on any deal.

That gap between “I don’t know how” and “I just did it” — that’s the gap this entire workshop is designed to close. But maybe there’s still a voice saying someone like you can’t actually do this. No finance background, not enough capital, no connections. Next, let me introduce you to three people who proved that voice wrong.