My Bondmason results after exit - yield is mediocre

This prompted me to take an early look at my own 1 year investment, coming up in a couple months. I wanted to see what the return might be over 1 year, after being fully deployed.

Might I enquire approximately how many loans you actually got deployed into, with 1k? I took a look at the thread, but not very good with German! I'm just wondering if you got unlucky with sample size.

I opened an account with BM November '16. I will admit this is not my best performing investment, but it is hands off and a sector of my portfolio. I have similar investments in Assetz, Octopus, etc. They seem to provide a similar return, though obviously via a very different platform (and perhaps asset). My account is a bit larger than yours, and perhaps should offer a better distribution of loans.

I have not attempted to add funds to BM since April this year. My account has been at ~98% deployment since then, apart from one recent blip where it spent the last few weeks down at ~90%, but is now back to 99% invested. Although this cash drag happens and it is sad to see, I must admit that I experience the same when I get repayments and self invest whilst waiting for the next decent opportunity, so am not sure why many complain about it. It is true I can shift funds into interest bearing accounts (assetz qaa for example), but often that requires a few days notice and some of the lending opps are now or never, so I tolerate it somewhat on BM.

BM don't IMO make it easy for you to self calculate your actual return. I suggested they might offer a CSV download of your positions and/or a detailed statement some time ago to aid this, but it still seems not possible.  I had no luck (or got fed up) trying to cut and paste into a spreadsheet to properly calculate it.

If I look simply at the 'nett return' figure, the amount paid to me in interest, minus fees and losses (nil), vs the amount I paid in, my return is 4.28%, which is not far from your own figure. Now, that does not factor for the scaling up of investment during the first few months, nor the cash drag whilst the account was fully deployed up until April. This probably has a fairly significant effect, so I believe I have faired better than you, for whatever reason. About 15% of that interest is accrued and not yet paid (and might not be of course).   I have experienced no losses to date, though there are 5 items on my 'watchlist'. These are amounts that are late, or have some issue, though that is all, so far. Nothing officially in 'default'. The amount represents 2.86% of my investment. The headline rate quoted for my account on the BM site is around 8.8% and has been for quite some time. It does not appear to reflect my actual or forecasted return, though I will admit I have obviously not calculated my return properly here.

If I could get a detailed statement in text format, instead of the paginated html one on the site, I could calculate the return accurately. I think this is not the sort of client BM is looking for (though I have no beef with them and fully admire what they are trying to do with the platform). I'm guessing the real return (for me) is somewhere around 5-6% (pre tax). Knock off a couple percent if some of that 'watchlist' turns to irrecoverable. 

If BM were happy to provide the detailed statement or do those calcs for me (  ), I'd be happy to share an accurate update, now, or when the full 'fully invested' year is up.

I'm a little disappointed in the return, but the platform is what it is and is in the 'hand off' category.

For people with money held for a year plus, is there anyone who has achieved the (now) 6.5% rate that would be the headline after fees? Or even better, anyone who has achieved over that rate?

If the target is 8%, and the fees are 1.5%, then I would expect there to be people doing better than 6.5% to average out with people such as you above who are not getting anywhere near that. At 3-4% it won't be long with interest rate rises coming that I might as well just lock it in a safe account.

Two accounts topped up to £5k over about 12 months (so adversely affected by cash drag) showing an XIRR of 6.4% and 6.7%.

There is a range in the returns across clients, a combination o:

 - the range of allocation speeds (discussed elsewhere);
 - the range of the rates in each loan (although this isn't so great); and
 - whether a client has been unlucky in achieving more than the average crystallised loss rate (the average is 0.4%).

We would like for everyone to get the same return, but are unable to structure our operations as a fund which would enable this - as there are liquidity, costs and other issues with having clients come into a fund. Nonetheless we are working at getting everyone closer to the average return - which is 6.5-7% after fees; 8% gross - for those that have been with us for a minimum of 12 months.

I obviously fall into the "unlucky" camp. To date crystallised losses are 30% of my net interest, defaults a further 59% and watchlist a further 42%, so I expect a net loss.

- PM

In response to propman. You do appear to be "unlucky" as, after 16 months, my crystallised losses are 11% of net interest and my defaults are 38%. I have only had one crystallised loss to date which was an invoice discounting loan.

In response to zlb. The purchase date of my loans in default are mostly in the range of Aug to Nov 2016, but one was bought in Sep 2017. They are all of 12 months duration apart from one which is 9 months. So, as expected, most loans default once they become due for repayment.

Looks like I'm one of the lucky ones so far. Crystallised losses 5.5% of net interest, a further 12% in default.