arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 30, 2017 8:37:11 GMT
Another borrower in administration, and I'm assuming it won't recover (their recovery performance has been dire to date), so my XIRR is now negative, ignoring incentive payments. I'm struggling to correlate my experience with the quoted returns on their "Statistics" (damned lies and all) page, so will spend a little time analysing their loan book at some point to work out how I've ended up being so unlucky...
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 27, 2017 14:50:14 GMT
I never did manage to get much of a pension in place across various employers and self-employment. The best I can muster is an Aviva policy, with a current transfer value of £28k and an age 60 projection of £45k (I'm mid 40s now). Just as well I'm not reliant on it to keep me in catfood in my dotage, really. Looking at what it's doing, there's a mix of funds - "Mixed 40-85% shares", Property, UK equity, Global equity, US equity, European equity. So - what would you do with it? Once you've moved it to a new platform, I'd suggest you look at starting to contribute to it again, as you can get a minimum of 20% tax relief on contributions, which makes it a very efficient savings vehicle for the long term.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 27, 2017 14:15:15 GMT
I hit 100% again on Friday so sent a little top-up - plan is never to add more than 5% of my current portfolio value.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 23, 2017 9:11:33 GMT
I chose the 1% settings purely to give me better diversification having a relative small portfolio. The trade-off to which, of course, is slower deployment. My own account is set to 1% - but I waited until I was fully deployed at 2% before changing it. I invested in this way too, and started with BM with my eyes open, expecting there to be uninvested periods. This is exactly how it is with my self-managed investments - occasionally I find myself with funds uninvested because of slower deal flow (MT) or poor deals (SS). I'm definitely now favouring the hands-off approach that BM allows, and I will simply drip-feed cash in as and when I become fully invested. If it takes on average a week to invest 4% of my portfolio then I won't deposit more than 4% per week. Simple.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 22, 2017 17:22:43 GMT
I am only an engineer and no expert in these matters, but I thought that the UK had moved away from the caveat emptor and information asymmetry, with protection afforded by the likes of the Consumer Rights Act 2015. I believe that SS owe investors a duty of care and by denying access to crucial documents during development, SS are breaching that duty. This is especially so since you changed the Ts&Cs and we investors are now lending directly to borrowers. I think this is an important point, and one which Savingstream's lawyers can probably advise Paul on. I would imagine if there was a substantial capital loss arising from a default and it subsequently came to light that Savingstream had been in possession of information that would have been material to the due diligence carried out by lenders, a case might be brought against the platform arguing that it is liable for lenders' losses, at least in part, if not in whole. I understand the sensitivity of borrowers to having their personal/private/business interests exposed, but if "caveat emptor" is applicable here then surely also "caveat venditor" should apply - reasonable disclosure should be an expectation when you're borrowing money from P2P lenders. If borrowers don't like it, they can (try to) borrow the money from banks instead...
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 10, 2017 9:55:53 GMT
I'm just surprised how many people are still adding money to Savingstream...
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 8, 2017 10:47:12 GMT
shimself 's suggestion elsewhere to provide a "95% invested" email notification might help this, and give people a day or two to free money from elsewhere, if they're looking to increase their investment with BM. Really like this - we will look at 50% & 95% emails (in addition to 100%). Thanks This sounds good - 50% and 95% are calls to action, whereas 100% is more of a pat-on-the-back for BondMason moment
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 8, 2017 9:06:01 GMT
In many of these cases the lenders will have an idea how much they want to invest ultimately and that money will be coming from other places that pay interest of some sort. What I would advocate is decoupling the individual loan amounts from the allocation, which would allow people to drip feed the money across causing much less drag and improving the XIRR. shimself 's suggestion elsewhere to provide a "95% invested" email notification might help this, and give people a day or two to free money from elsewhere, if they're looking to increase their investment with BM.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 3, 2017 11:04:55 GMT
What a spectacularly ugly thing. I couldn't possibly invest, on principle, and there's a very real risk that wealthy people will come to their senses sometime and the resale value will plummet.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 3, 2017 10:22:57 GMT
I'm sitting on my investments here, extracting repaid capital and interest periodically, but not actively selling up, so my Lexit will take some time. It's by far my worst-performing P2P investment, ignoring the incentive money. XIRR peaked at 3.54% in September last year, but dropped below 1% last month thanks to yet another default. Lots of losses, zero recoveries. It's a shame, really - they seem to have a nice website and a solid business plan, delivering IFISA well ahead of others, but apparently lacking the key, basic skills for a lending operation.
The cynic would say that this shows the inherent danger of P2P, where a slick lender recruitment operation can keep money flowing in the door regardless of the quality of the underlying loans, and IFISA will just make that even worse. Should the FCA do more to validate the claimed target rate of 6% pa, when almost all past investors have failed to achieve anything close?
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Mar 2, 2017 13:43:30 GMT
I am wondering if anyone else here has witnessed sporadic one day losses in their daily balance returns and also the clumping of low rate loans within a single allocation day. By low rate I am referring to loans below 7% of course. I will try and upload my plots in a later post on this thread.
Yes, I've seen this, as recently as yesterday, with the balance being a few tens of pence (40p I think) lower than the previous day. I took this as being a discrepancy between the accrued and actual interest paid, and possibly an artefact of the aggregation process, but would welcome an explanation from BM if one is forthcoming.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Feb 28, 2017 14:22:06 GMT
Same for me on Max/Firefox every time, have to log in twice. Are you using uBlock/uBlock Origin, too? Not at present - this is a fresh install so haven't "tooled up" my browsers yet, especially Firefox, which I only use for a handful of sites.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Feb 28, 2017 12:07:49 GMT
Tried using the following, made no difference, still able to log in with no problems / redirects / etc. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36 Bar any other comments, looks like it may well fall into the "Is it just me...?" category. Seems odd that it's two machines, five browsers... Same for me on Max/Firefox every time, have to log in twice.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Jan 13, 2017 15:04:44 GMT
I dropped LC an email. It is now amended--Monday 16th January. Let's hope that they pay up. Spoilsport.
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arbster
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Post by arbster on Jan 13, 2017 13:54:01 GMT
That's the difference between an article trying to persuade people to invest in property, versus an article covering the risks to UK higher education post-Brexit. Of course, they're not mutually exclusive - the (smaller number of) EU students will be feeling much wealthier now, and maybe able to buy and sub-let student accommodation.
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