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Post by Butch Cassidy on Aug 7, 2018 6:39:52 GMT
I first invested at the end of Jan 2015 as an experiment when it was still possible to buy mortgage loans at 15-18% which were good to hold also to sell via SM at a healthy premium (most of these now have had enforced buybacks). These became harder to buy & so I transferred to short term guaranteed buy back loans for 12-14% which have now dropped to c.10% & lower along with an across the board drop in both rates & loan quality. I have no appetite for auto lending & manual lending no longer offers much value IMO so I have just liquidated my entire portfolio, all sold within a couple of hours via SM largely at par.
After 3 1/2 years my initial deposit has more than doubled & my dashboard return is 17.58%pa which I am more than happy with, the platform has grown significantly over this time & no longer meets my investment requirements but thanks for the journey & good luck for the future to all those still invested, even though I doubt you can repeat the returns that the early adopters achieved.
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Post by nesako on Aug 7, 2018 7:12:55 GMT
I first invested at the end of Jan 2015 as an experiment when it was still possible to buy mortgage loans at 15-18% which were good to hold also to sell via SM at a healthy premium (most of these now have had enforced buybacks). These became harder to buy & so I transferred to short term guaranteed buy back loans for 12-14% which have now dropped to c.10% & lower along with an across the board drop in both rates & loan quality. I have no appetite for auto lending & manual lending no longer offers much value IMO so I have just liquidated my entire portfolio, all sold within a couple of hours via SM largely at par.
After 3 1/2 years my initial deposit has more than doubled & my dashboard return is 17.58%pa which I am more than happy with, the platform has grown significantly over this time & no longer meets my investment requirements but thanks for the journey & good luck for the future to all those still invested, even though I doubt you can repeat the returns that the early adopters achieved. Yup, I also believe that the "Gold" age of P2P is sadly over... questions is, where are you investing next? Or are you using your funds to buy something?
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Post by Butch Cassidy on Aug 7, 2018 7:51:10 GMT
Just started an experiment with Football Index (see General>chat thread for relevant discussion) currently showing 15% return in less than a fortnight, so quite an impressive start, also fancy their equity via Seedrs if it pops up on SM.
The only P2P platforms that I would consider increasing my exposure to are Abl & MT (possibly Welendus) depending on opportunities.
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mp
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Post by mp on Aug 7, 2018 10:47:23 GMT
I've also been with Mintos since 2015 and so far it has been a great ride!
I don't have as good return as Butch Cassidy, my dashboard showing 12.82%. This may possibly be because I have added most of the funds later, my initial investment in 2015 (when interests were great) was much smaller than the balance in 2018. Additionally I've not been that active on secondary markets, it's been mostly buy and hold with an exception of selling few accidentally bough loans without buyback guarantee.
I just checked the last month's account statement and calculated that the paybacks + principal received total in July was whopping 66% of my overall portfolio value. So 2/3rds of the portfolio repaid despite the fact that the average duration was about 17months!!
My portfolio was too heavily biased to Mogo earlier, but now, after 75% of my Mogo loans are paid back, it is much more balanced which means reduced risk for single loan originator.
Now when seeing new loans issued under 10%, I've decided not to re-invest much further, instead I have so far withdrawn 1/3rd of the portfolio and planning to continue the withdrawals still further unless the situation changes.
The share of P2P in my overall portfolio was anyway much too big for my taste. Therefore the increased paybacks and reduced interest rates provided a good opportunity and motivation to reduce my p2p exposure. I've used withdrawn funds for other investment types (different ETFs mostly) offering improved diversification and reduced dependency for single p2p platform.
I think the returns at the first year(s) were too good to be true for long term, especially as we have not seen any other risks realising than the Eurocent (which luckily had only minimal impact for me). But anyway, I think 10+% interest without any risks is probably unrealistic expectation nowadays.
It will be interesting to see how fast my portfolio continues to run down by paybacks & scheduled principal payments. The current weighted average duration is about 15m but I expect it to be much shorter in reality due to paybacks. Anyway, it is good to hear that the secondary market is very liquid if a faster withdrawal would be preferred.
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fric
Member of DD Central
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Post by fric on Aug 7, 2018 12:15:45 GMT
I've also been with Mintos since 2015 and so far it has been a great ride! I don't have as good return as Butch Cassidy, my dashboard showing 12.82%. This may possibly be because I have added most of the funds later, my initial investment in 2015 (when interests were great) was much smaller than the balance in 2018. Additionally I've not been that active on secondary markets, it's been mostly buy and hold with an exception of selling few accidentally bough loans without buyback guarantee. I just checked the last month's account statement and calculated that the paybacks + principal received total in July was whopping 66% of my overall portfolio value. So 2/3rds of the portfolio repaid despite the fact that the average duration was about 17months!! My portfolio was too heavily biased to Mogo earlier, but now, after 75% of my Mogo loans are paid back, it is much more balanced which means reduced risk for single loan originator. Now when seeing new loans issued under 10%, I've decided not to re-invest much further, instead I have so far withdrawn 1/3rd of the portfolio and planning to continue the withdrawals still further unless the situation changes. The share of P2P in my overall portfolio was anyway much too big for my taste. Therefore the increased paybacks and reduced interest rates provided a good opportunity and motivation to reduce my p2p exposure. I've used withdrawn funds for other investment types (different ETFs mostly) offering improved diversification and reduced dependency for single p2p platform. I think the returns at the first year(s) were too good to be true for long term, especially as we have not seen any other risks realising than the Eurocent (which luckily had only minimal impact for me). But anyway, I think 10+% interest without any risks is probably unrealistic expectation nowadays. It will be interesting to see how fast my portfolio continues to run down by paybacks & scheduled principal payments. The current weighted average duration is about 15m but I expect it to be much shorter in reality due to paybacks. Anyway, it is good to hear that the secondary market is very liquid if a faster withdrawal would be preferred. The problem is, I don't think any of the risks are significantly smaller if the loans are under 10%, they are still high risk, high interest rate loans to people with either sub-par credit history or income.
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Post by nellerdk on Aug 7, 2018 20:11:10 GMT
I first invested at the end of Jan 2015 as an experiment when it was still possible to buy mortgage loans at 15-18% which were good to hold also to sell via SM at a healthy premium (most of these now have had enforced buybacks). These became harder to buy & so I transferred to short term guaranteed buy back loans for 12-14% which have now dropped to c.10% & lower along with an across the board drop in both rates & loan quality. I have no appetite for auto lending & manual lending no longer offers much value IMO so I have just liquidated my entire portfolio, all sold within a couple of hours via SM largely at par.
After 3 1/2 years my initial deposit has more than doubled & my dashboard return is 17.58%pa which I am more than happy with, the platform has grown significantly over this time & no longer meets my investment requirements but thanks for the journey & good luck for the future to all those still invested, even though I doubt you can repeat the returns that the early adopters achieved. Yup, I also believe that the "Gold" age of P2P is sadly over... questions is, where are you investing next? Or are you using your funds to buy something? why is it over when you can get 0,8% in a bank interest rate account? Isn't it attractive then to get 9% interest on Mintos, PeerBerry, Twino or similar? Of course you feel like it is little, psychologically, bacause you have been getting higher interest rates in the past. The stock market will not guarantee you 9% per year.
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Post by nellerdk on Aug 7, 2018 20:12:26 GMT
I first invested at the end of Jan 2015 as an experiment when it was still possible to buy mortgage loans at 15-18% which were good to hold also to sell via SM at a healthy premium (most of these now have had enforced buybacks). These became harder to buy & so I transferred to short term guaranteed buy back loans for 12-14% which have now dropped to c.10% & lower along with an across the board drop in both rates & loan quality. I have no appetite for auto lending & manual lending no longer offers much value IMO so I have just liquidated my entire portfolio, all sold within a couple of hours via SM largely at par.
After 3 1/2 years my initial deposit has more than doubled & my dashboard return is 17.58%pa which I am more than happy with, the platform has grown significantly over this time & no longer meets my investment requirements but thanks for the journey & good luck for the future to all those still invested, even though I doubt you can repeat the returns that the early adopters achieved. where have you moves the money to, now that you liquidated your whole mintos portfolio? I imagine you moved the money into some new investments?
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fric
Member of DD Central
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Post by fric on Aug 8, 2018 5:46:00 GMT
Yup, I also believe that the "Gold" age of P2P is sadly over... questions is, where are you investing next? Or are you using your funds to buy something? why is it over when you can get 0,8% in a bank interest rate account? Isn't it attractive then to get 9% interest on Mintos, PeerBerry, Twino or similar? Of course you feel like it is little, psychologically, bacause you have been getting higher interest rates in the past. The stock market will not guarantee you 9% per year.
Nor does mintos guarantee anything, even with buybacks - they are good as long as the loan originator is solvent. Low cost Index ETFs actually average more than 9% a year in the past decade. I do agree that its a psychological thing partly. But also we have to remember one thing - the risks associated with lending on Mintos have not significantly decreased with loans at 8-9% compared to when the same loans were 13-15%. So basically we are having roughly the same risk as before, but instead of 13-15% we are getting like 8-9% now for the new loans. Just imagine a hypothetical situation: Mintos is establish in 2003, it grows fast, than 2008 comes... How many loans originators would have gone bust in 2008 type of a situation? Stocks (in a broader index sense, not one particular small stock, that can go bust ofc) may loose 20%, 30%, 40% and have a chance of bounce back. Mintos high risk lending? Depending on which loan originators are you invested in, you could loose close to 100% with 0% chance of bounce back.
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Post by nesako on Aug 8, 2018 10:28:51 GMT
why is it over when you can get 0,8% in a bank interest rate account? Isn't it attractive then to get 9% interest on Mintos, PeerBerry, Twino or similar? Of course you feel like it is little, psychologically, bacause you have been getting higher interest rates in the past. The stock market will not guarantee you 9% per year.
Nor does mintos guarantee anything, even with buybacks - they are good as long as the loan originator is solvent. Low cost Index ETFs actually average more than 9% a year in the past decade. I do agree that its a psychological thing partly. But also we have to remember one thing - the risks associated with lending on Mintos have not significantly decreased with loans at 8-9% compared to when the same loans were 13-15%. So basically we are having roughly the same risk as before, but instead of 13-15% we are getting like 8-9% now for the new loans. Just imagine a hypothetical situation: Mintos is establish in 2003, it grows fast, than 2008 comes... How many loans originators would have gone bust in 2008 type of a situation? Stocks (in a broader index sense, not one particular small stock, that can go bust ofc) may loose 20%, 30%, 40% and have a chance of bounce back. Mintos high risk lending? Depending on which loan originators are you invested in, you could loose close to 100% with 0% chance of bounce back. I really cannot word it better than above the only thing I can add is that most of my savings are getting 5% risk-free (FSCS protected) interest by utilising all UK Regular Saver accounts, the account which is earning least is still getting over 2% AER (Wyelands Bank / Atom Bank). P2P is still more profitable, but times of semi-decent risk-reward ratio are probably over... I am not personally removing any P2P money yet, but the difference is that I am no longer putting any NEW money in
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mp
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Post by mp on Aug 8, 2018 15:45:47 GMT
From risk point of view I could compare P2P to stock market investing. I.e. the payback guarantees etc are as good as the loan originator company. So in practice you would be investing/betting to the success of the combination of both the loan originator company and the broker (Mintos) instead of just relying on the end customers to pay back the loans. Investing via Mintos to different loan originators is like investing to stocks of individual companies, you are betting that they survive and grow their business, pay dividends and increase the value of the company.
I would expect the recovery to be difficult and slow if either p2p broker or p2p loan originator would default. In case of Mintos you need to rely on two companies (Mintos and loan originator) to stay alive to get back your principal and interests (so far we have not seen much from Eurocent, despite payback guarantees).
My view is that investing to P2P is more risky than investing to well established stock market listed companies. And P2P investing is even significantly more risky than investing to well diversified investment in stock market (like ETFs containing tens or hundreds of different companies). And for such P2P risks the investors would expect a return in form of interest that is higher than the average long term stock market return (dividends + stock/ETF price increase).
One of the benefits of P2P is the (hopefully steady) monthly cash flow and compounding interests vs quarterly or annual dividends + fluctuating value of stocks/ETFs. With P2P there should be no major change to actual capital invested (if the originators stay alive and the loans are payback guaranteed). With solid loan originators this works probably quite, fine as long as there is no major economical melt down, in which case the P2P end customers and loan originators may suffer more than diversified portfolio of stocks of well established companies.
Due to the above, I am currently reducing my share in P2P portfolio back to the level (i.e. share of the my portfolio) that I would be more comfortable with.
My actions: - fully exited Twino (at XIR of 14.8%) - withdrawn capital + 20% from Bondora (lucky me, started 2013 but decided to start withdrawing back in 2015, thanks to this forum!!) - still struggling a lot to withdraw (due to many defaulted loans) anything from Lendy (UK) - withdrawing a from Mintos too, I may reconsider re-investing part of principal and interest received if the interests return to 11-13% levels
Thanks to significant overweight in Mintos (vs other platforms mentioned above), my profits from P2P have well covered the issues of other platforms, so P2P overall has been good so far, assuming the good success with Mintos continues! This forum has been great source of info, so many thanks to the community!
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JamesFrance
Member of DD Central
Port Grimaud 1974
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Post by JamesFrance on Aug 9, 2018 9:06:25 GMT
My actions: - fully exited Twino (at XIR of 14.8%) - withdrawn capital + 20% from Bondora (lucky me, started 2013 but decided to start withdrawing back in 2015, thanks to this forum!!) - still struggling a lot to withdraw (due to many defaulted loans) anything from Lendy (UK) - withdrawing a from Mintos too, I may reconsider re-investing part of principal and interest received if the interests return to 11-13% levels Thanks to significant overweight in Mintos (vs other platforms mentioned above), my profits from P2P have well covered the issues of other platforms, so P2P overall has been good so far, assuming the good success with Mintos continues! Almost exactly the same for me, at Twino 6000€ profit and down to 600 left there since they dropped their rates. Much the same with the others and more still coming from Bondora defaulters (less the 35% they are taking from the repayments these days).
The only reason I invested in longer loans at Mintos was to lock in the current rate if the rates drop in future. We all know what happened to that, so I will only take very short terms here with buyback if the offered rates increase and never again consider longer terms.
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Post by patright on Aug 10, 2018 6:15:34 GMT
I have similar figures actually from the one of James except for bondora where I did not exit quickly enough Now, I do think that P2P is on a down slope and that's with a lot of money available still The borrower being high risk and a financial meltdown on the horizon, it's time for me to go back to Precious Metals and try to score a similar run as I did in 2011 with Silver this time however, I am going physical instead of ETF because I think the next crash will be much bigger than 2008 of course it's not for the one wanting immediate return, but different time/situation call for different actions (for me that is)
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bazzy
New Member
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Post by bazzy on Aug 12, 2018 13:22:53 GMT
I have similar figures actually from the one of James except for bondora where I did not exit quickly enough Now, I do think that P2P is on a down slope and that's with a lot of money available still The borrower being high risk and a financial meltdown on the horizon, it's time for me to go back to Precious Metals and try to score a similar run as I did in 2011 with Silver this time however, I am going physical instead of ETF because I think the next crash will be much bigger than 2008 of course it's not for the one wanting immediate return, but different time/situation call for different actions (for me that is) What would cause the crash and why would it be bigger than 2008? And what is your horizon? 6 months, a year, 5 years? People have been talking about the next crash for several years and still the economy is doing better and better every year since 2009. The only reasoning for the crash seems to be that stocks have been rising for so many years in a row. But so has the business of the companies. I'm not saying that there could'n be a crash, I'm just wondering what would cause it. Trump? China?
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Post by patright on Aug 12, 2018 16:21:15 GMT
I have similar figures actually from the one of James except for bondora where I did not exit quickly enough Now, I do think that P2P is on a down slope and that's with a lot of money available still The borrower being high risk and a financial meltdown on the horizon, it's time for me to go back to Precious Metals and try to score a similar run as I did in 2011 with Silver this time however, I am going physical instead of ETF because I think the next crash will be much bigger than 2008 of course it's not for the one wanting immediate return, but different time/situation call for different actions (for me that is) What would cause the crash and why would it be bigger than 2008? And what is your horizon? 6 months, a year, 5 years? People have been talking about the next crash for several years and still the economy is doing better and better every year since 2009. The only reasoning for the crash seems to be that stocks have been rising for so many years in a row. But so has the business of the companies. I'm not saying that there could'n be a crash, I'm just wondering what would cause it. Trump? China? Well, pin pointing what will cause the crash is beyond me, what I am looking at is the number of elements that could cause the crash making it more and more likely Of course I have always felt that once QE would be done in both the US and the EU, it would be a sign of exiting risky assets that have benefited from them, the flow of easy money basically, and well the EU is stopping QE by the end of the year. As far as the risk in the economy, well the QE have created an "everything bubble" in the US: Auto loans , student loans, real estate (funny that banks have started again offering loans with as little as 3.5% down (and in fact those 3.5% can come from a discount from the broker) Any loans in the US that is variable rate is about to go up, putting many people in distress, in fact we can see that the real estate is already slowing down The Yield curve is the US could invert this fall (treasuries bond, you can research it) usually a strong indicator of recession it's pretty much in free fall in Australia. The stock market is fueled in the US by the FANG mostly if not only, and that's mostly thanks to buy backs of stocks from US companies getting a huge tax discount, that's a one off thing though.. China is becoming an increasing risk as well Japan's debt is out of control , standing at 240% of GDP, mostly owned by Japanese people, that's true but even a short increase of yield would have devastating effect, how long will the BOJ able to keep the boat floating And then, you have geopolitical issues, how long can Russia be pushed to the wall?, how about Iran, Turkey, Brazil etc etc so far all seems good because trouble elsewhere in the world makes the US market rallies as people move money to the "safe haven" So that's just to name a few factors, there are many more, and they are usually a sign for me that something could take place as early at this fall , if such is the case, I prefer to be in Precious metal than in P2P lending, silver is clearly undervalued right now Now forgive my level of English here and also please note I am not a native speaker and none of the above is any advice on anything
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fric
Member of DD Central
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Post by fric on Aug 14, 2018 5:51:02 GMT
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