idiots guide to RS and the like.

Spend a few minutes throughout the day each day watching the varying rates of your chosen market. You should then have a feel for rates at least. Good luck.

Mmm, Ratesetter already consider you and expert if you've done that!

I'd say if you're using the monthly market, don't stress too much over getting the best rate. For your £1000, gaining an extra 0.1% will get you less than 10p more at the end of the month. You could argue all those 10ps add up, but it takes a lot of months before it adds up to much more than a hill of beans, and if you delay lending for one day to try to catch that 0.1%, it costs you about 10p in lost interest. Just setting reinvest at market rate is a nice stress free way to get an easy-ish access, low-ish risk, 3-ish percent.

As you speak of "the misery rates available as a saver" but have invested £1k in Ratesetter at 3.4%, can we clarify if you've already taken full advantage of all the current accounts paying decent interest?

Some of them pay way more than 3.4%, albeit for fairly small sums, all are fully covered by the FSCS and give instant access. By using several you should be able to stash away around £60k or more at between 3.00-5.00% and double that between you and your partner. (A bit less than was possible now that some banks have reduced the number of new accounts they allow per customer.)

While the arithmetic of pursuing an extra 0.1% or two, as set out be markr, is clear enough, I wouldn't be prepared to take on the additional risks of P2P without getting a decent margin over what I can get in a rock-solid current account. At the moment my target for 1 month money is 4.00% and I'm not sure I'll be too interested at much less than that - other than on a very short-term basis. My first £1k put in at MR got just 2.9% which wasn't too promising. After finding that little link to set my own rate I've now managed to get the overall average up to 3.9% with the help of a couple of loans at above 4%. What does surprise me is that there's currently a queue of people to offer a 1yr fix at just 3.3% and still no takers. There's obviously a lot I need to learn because, for private investors, that doesn't make much sense to me. I just don't understand the strategy. Warning: like you, I'm a complete newbie at this of just a week and still testing the waters so my views might make no sense either.

The trickiest part for me is to actually assess the level of risk because I'm still not clear on exactly what happens in various circumstances. For example the exact level of "the small fee" Ratesetter refer to in my welcome email if I want to bail out of a contract. It read "Don't worry, with our Sell Out feature you can access your money at any point for a small fee. Find out more." The 'Find out more' link didn't work.

The trick seems to be to push up your rate to an acceptable level without having too much dead money lolling around. After less than a week my learning of how that's done is still a work in progress.

Thanks for that.  So the "small fee" might be anything but small.  P2P would only ever be a very small proportion of my investments and I'll always have others where I could raise any cash I wanted. I tend to keep a lot, too much, in cash anyway. So the only circumstances I can envisage when I might want an exit would be if I sensed serious problems for the platform or industry.  3 to 5 years is a long time in a very young industry so would take a seriously tempting offer for me to commit to that sort of term without being able to reasonably accurately cost what the exit price would be.

At the moment, I see a real 3.5% upwards as fine for 1 month money - a small premium over the 3.0% I get in our 4 Santander accounts which are the lowest paying of the current accounts we have.  At the moment I can put money into RS when I see decent rates on offer:  the interesting bit will be when I see whether decent rates are consistently available for for reinvestment.

Would you mind saying what you feel a reasonable expection of overall return for 1 month RS money over a longer period would be?  Seeing offers to lend at 2.9% today makes me wonder if my 3.9% average so far might not be so easy to maintain.

Thanks Kevin.  I see there the average for 1 month money is 3.1% but for 1 year is 3.7% - which for 1 year is probably above what I spotted over the week.  So things seem to be a bit out of kilter at the moment.

Would be surprised if informed retail savers were content with lending at 3.0% and below when they can get 3.00-5.00% from current accounts, so is that largely institutional money coming in?  Interesting to see the extent of daily swings - some in excess of 1%.

You've spoiled my day: you're killing the conspiracy theory that institutional money is being used to manipulate rates down ! Worse, you're saying that they would like to manipulate rates up, but there is insufficient proportion to achieve that. 

Where do us conspiracy theorists go next ? Ah, I've got it: its the data that is being manipulated to mask the fact that the rates are being manipulated ! Obvious !