Funding Circle in Great Peril

The best thing to do is click sell (you don't actually have to sell anything) and on the right it will say "Total amount of your active loan parts available for sale".  That will quickly tell you what amount of your total loans is late or downgraded (Portfolio total - amount available for sale).

I think if more people did this they would quickly realise that the picture is much worse than they thought.

Yes but if you take a guess as to how much of what you can't sell will end up being lost (say 40%) then that's around 5% of your total investment that you will lose.  If you knock that £340 ish off your total interest whats it do to your total return percentages?

What has really annoyed me about FC (and is why I have now withdrawn the 7 figure sum I had invested, save unsellables) is the increasing lack of transparency.  They make people jump through hoops to get this info and the removal of the complete loan book data was the final straw for me. 

Well yes but FC are taking active steps to reduce transparency which I believe is an attempt to pull the wool over investors eyes.  They are making it harder and harder to get the information investors require.

FC are also the only platform to give you an annualised return after fees and bad debts (well out of the 8 or 9 platforms I have used) and I think people are taking this as a fact when in many cases it will overstate returns. They could clearly show how much of your portfolio is late or downgraded but they choose not to. 

I honestly think many investors believe they are getting the annualised return and can withdraw everything whenever they want to.  They do no more investigation, just add more cash!  For example an investor could have been investing for one year and see an annualised return of 8.5% and think yes this is amazing and I can get my money out whenever I want (and people on here keep saying its instant liquidity). Reality may be that 15% of their loan book is unsellable, so if they withdrew everything now they would only get 93.5% back of what they invested (less after tax).  Of course over time some of the late/downgraded loans will return money so maybe after a year or two they have all their money back and a year or two after that they may have a small profit (but certainly less than 8.5%).

This is all fine I just don't think most people realise the reality.  It's certainly not like an instant access savings account as many make out.

As has been pointed out here before, it seems to be a case of "top brass" and city bankers satisfying their Feline Cravings in the expectation that the platform will IPO in the next year or two. Someone somewhere is purring like the pussy who got the cream, but it certainly isn't the humble investor who entrusts his (or her) hard-earned pennies to this platform in the expectation that management will take their fiduciary duties seriously.

exactly - I too have withdrawn 100% except for a few pennies (literally) that dribble in.
FC did not like astute in-house forum comments so they scrapped it - didn't work did it!

They do not like people analysing the truth behind the spin rubbish they pump out so they remove the loan book data - bit of a theme here

Also the point about unsellable loans is very cogent and to be honest it caught me out.

I think this is a problem with all P2P lending (excepted guaranteed returns) viz if the loan book is not properly managed e.g. a company takes any old rubbish to get their fees in etc then such unsellable loans really hit the bottom line .I firmly believe that some p2p companies are a de facto Ponzi scheme as short term  money keeps flowing out to lenders whilst long term and irrecoverable debt keeps stacking up. I am not saying FC is such a company because they no longer interest me due to their attitude which I really don't like.


I am just glad I ditched my holding with them... 

Wonga collapse could be interesting, I wonder if p2p could help and offer to help the borrower for cheaper rate? As far as I know, wonga charges 292% pa