Have any of you actually lost money investing in P2P?

Pretty sure you'll get a really wide range of answers. But, bear in mind, P2P as a retail investment has hugely grown in popularity recently as as such, many of the troubles have not even come to light. Some are starting to now. Many of the troubled investments are not yet to term, or may be 'rolled' and simply pushed further down the road. Unless you get someone who has been fully invested for at least a couple years and gone through a few investment and repayment cycles, I would not consider the answers that they provide that illuminating. There is a massive quality range in terms of loans across the providers (and sometimes even the same providers). Losses in p2p are I think inevitable. It's a game of averages.

For completely hands off and diversified investments, it may well be more prudent to look at the aggregators such as Assetz, Bond Mason, etc.  I can't really see 'unsophisticated' investors making the sort of investments that are discussed on these boards safely (in general). If I were looking to suggest someone get involved in P2p without them wanting to directly perform due diligence and management of their investments, that's likely where I'd push them.

Really interesting, thanks

We don't charge a fee for an initial consultation.

Steve

Pretty well all of us who have been around for a while will have had losses on individual loans (unless we only do PF backed lending).  Net losses on individual platfoms, or on p2p as a whole, would be less common but not unheard of.

Reclaiming via debt collectors or collection agencies is not something that lenders can do themselves.  The platforms have their own collection processes (for better or worse ) and their T&Cs (or those that I have read) preclude borrowers taking any separate action either individually or collectively.

I don't think I've had a single bad loan where the involvement of debt collectors or agencies in the collection of the loan by the platform has been visible to me.  That's possibly because my unprotected lending is all p2b.  However, I am in a bad "lend to lend" loan where the administrator of the borrower has used debt collectors or agencies to collect its debts, with limited success - enough to pay for the administration but very little left for lenders.

If you are thinking about risks for your clients, the other key risk you need to think about is liquidity.  Where loans go bad the collection process may take many years.  Additionally, platforms generally restrict the trading of loans that are (or have recently been) not fully performing, or have been rescheduled.  The extent of such restrictions varies greatly between platforms.  The main platforms that I use are AC and TC:

On AC, loans are usually suspended from trading for only a short period while information is published to lenders (including prospective lenders).  Once the suspension is lifted lenders can generally get out although they may have to offer a discount.  (The discounts needed to get a loan away are surprisingly small; lenders are not good IMO at pricing risk.)

On TC, loans can be suspended for a very long time if not indefinitely.  This is because TC have a policy of only providing information about loan "events" to the lenders in the loan.  Prospective buyers do not have the information and so, for their protection, the loans are suspended.  This does not particularly bother me, because I don't need the liquidity.  But for some it would be a killer.

Plenty of material about losses on the forum. Have a read Steve. That way you would get a more balanced view. Beware though as some posters are not all they seem.

+1 on that. I've been invested there for a while and it's another send money and forget platform that seems to do what is says on the label and from what I have seen, is reasonably robust in its investments.