Performance report for 2020 (and quarterly updates in 2021)

Yes, coming to p2p later and avoiding a number of platforms that are now in administration definitely helps the health of your portfolio, but also the ability to invest on platforms with higher minimum per loan.
I’m a small investor and this is the main reason I’m not in some of the platforms you have listed. In manual lending, the highest investment in a single loan I’ve ever made was £500 (Lendy’s DFL005), far outside my comfort zone. If I go for 1k per loan investments I will be very poorly diversified.

Yes, property secured loans from Lendy, Col, BM, FS, MT had left bad taste in my mouth. However, I understand that not all property lending is like this. Can’t judge everyone by “Lendy” standard.

Kuflink (£100 per loan) is within my capability. When I found out about Kuflink I was already in 19 platforms and had no desire to expand any further. At the peak my p2p pot was approaching 28% of my available cash and I didn’t want to expand that. I don’t really want to go over 20% any more. Now it is 15%, so I’ve got some capacity for a new platform (or two). Kuflink is the next on my list to try.

I thought CP was £500 per loan (outside my comfort zone), but looking at website again I read that if I use Autoinvest I can spread £500 across multiple projects, which could be a comfortable start for me. Can this practically work?

Thank you. I didn't know this. I'll probably give these two a go in near future.

I'm curious how people reinvesting their returns on Ablrate these days. I did it in the past because there were plenty of discounts and at par trade, but now almost everything is at hefty premium... Or do people hold on to their repayments in Abl cash account until next loan (or another tranche of existing loan) comes in?  

I use a mixture of sm bids at a modest premium, and with a small ££ waiting on platform, and replenish when needed, and remove other ££ to LP, pending a new loan or sm replenish. requires daily platform checks so a pita. Also like you have noticed bargains  are getting few and far between. 

Haha thanks Ace  
Watch this space and we will certainly consider plans to introduce an ISA in the future.


Have a wonderful day,

Roxana

Capital at risk. Please read the full warning on our website.

Nice to see your P2P portfolio working well for you.

Having exited a few platforms, maybe you would be inclined to give us, Rebuildingsociety.com a try? We’ve made several improvements in recent years and our lifetime average is above 6% see our outcomes blog posts. Obviously this may vary in future.

Risk adverse lenders can even use the P2P buyback guarantee, to protect their capital, which as you know, is otherwise at risk.

It would be good to have you as part of our community.

Hi danraj ,

I've looked at Rebs a couple of times in the past and decided against it. I don't keep records on platforms I've rejected so I'm not certain why, but recall that ISA fees were an issue for me. I also recall that the platform didn't work well on my android tablet. Anyway, since you've prompted me I decided to take another look. 

My initial thoughts are: 

There's obviously been a platform refresh since I last looked (can't remember when that was) and it's much more pleasing on the eye than I recall. Tick

It seems to format correctly on my android tablet. Tick

The initial thoughts on the mechanics of the platform from a fairly experienced P2P'er having lent on 35 different platforms is: "wow that looks complicated". That's not necessarily a problem for me; I quite enjoy digging in the weeds of a platform to see how it works, but I can see why less experienced or time-short lenders might give it a miss and move on to one of many other platforms. 

Yep, as I thought, those ISA fees are still there. I'm sure you will tell me that the fees are reasonable, but I'm not aware of any of the platforms I've tried so far charging a monthly ISA fee, and only ABLrate charges a transfer-in fee (and even they waive the fee if its over a certain amount). If I wanted to test the platform with a £1000 ISA transfer I'd need to earn 5.2% in the first year just to breakeven! 

The most concerning thing for me is the info on your stats page. There's no info as to what units Total Loss and Total Gains are measured in (I'm assuming £k). I think some text to describe these tables would be useful. Regardless, the combined figures show that Total Loss is roughly half the Total Gains. That tells me that one's returns are likely to be extremely variable, so having the necessary skills (or luck) to pick the good loans is key. That implies that it might need a considerable amount of time to allocate to loan DD.

It certainly isn't the case that you can trust ReBs' risk assessment as the loans that you rate as the least risky (A+) have made the worst returns,  I.e. 13.3% loss on average. That may be a little unfair as there are only 4 loans in that category, but even so! 

Stats for the last 18 months look encouraging, but is that just because defaults tend to happen later in a loan's life? 

There's a row at the top of the Overview By Risk Grade table that has no entry in the App Risk column. I couldn't work out what that represented. 

I am tempted to give ReBs a try with a small sum to take a look from inside the fence as I know others have had a reasonable return, but it probably won't be via an ISA.