Brand New To P2P Investing and Looking for Guidance

In the present climate of quite a few failed P2P platforms I don't think many people will want to recommend particular platforms. But you are in the right place to read up on the available platforms and what the general opinions of them are. If you find a few platforms that you think you might like ask specific questions about those until you are comfortable to invest.

Read the platform T&Cs understand exactly how each platform works, remember no FSCS protection, try not to invest money that you could not afford to lose, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, etc.

Hello Greenwood2,

Many thanks for your information and suggestions.
They are very helpful to know.

There are so many different companies on here that it will take me a while to look through each one and get a feeling for myself.

Most companies seem to deal with property although one I found was talking about personal items like watches and paintings so I will have a look at both.
Checking over the T&C`S is certainly very important so thank you again for pointing that out to me.

The only one I know that is dealing with bling/pawn is Unbolted. This one has been a reliable earner for me and many others.  My return from Unbolted has so far (4 years) been approx 8% p.a. You can't invest a large sum in one go, but you can build a small portfolio over a period of time.  

Hello Moderator,

Thank you for the suggestion with regard to spreading my money over a number of different platforms.
That is something that I might not have considered but thinking about it, it makes perfect sense.

I have been looking at all the threads, there are so many!!

I think I am in for a lot of reading.

Many thanks

Hello iRobot,

Thanks for the post.
I really am a complete novice to be honest but would like to be able to make my own choices in what I invest and when.
I don`t want to invest into a fund.

The money I have is purely for investment and not something that I am going to need for a few years.

What is the new platform called?
I will look at the thread once I find it.

Many thanks

There are a few loans each day, but most are for relatively small amounts (e.g. £1000 for a watch). They clearly have far more investor funds waiting to be invested than they can generate loans for. In theory, you can select which loans to invest in, but in practice all the loans are taken up by auto investors, so nothing left for manual investing. So, this platform might not suit your desire to select the loans you want. 

Hi,
I have been investing in P2P for a few years, but am a novice compared to most on here! The things I learned initially are:
If you use an auto lend platform drip feed your money in or you can end up with some relatively large holdings.
Try a small amount in a number of platforms as they all work slightly differently.
You should read T&Cs but it is unlikely you will be able to understand from them everything that might hack you off in the future. And the T&Cs never mention the risk of joining a platform that has no respect for its investors. You will get a good feel for those platforms on here. I'm happy to tell you to avoid Funding circle and Crowd2fund. 
Accept from the beginning that you will have defaults and personal guarantees are generally poor security (I cleaned that up) 
And losses may take the rest of your life to recover. If at all of course. 

As self select platforms go Proplend seems to be widely liked. The only complaint seems to be that investors can't invest enough. I had one write off and I think they have only had one! 
I just started investing with Crowd property and Unbolted. I did my research and found them to have good 4th Way reviews and generally positive comments on here and they were a bit different to other platforms I use. I have found them to be easy to use and very responsive to questions.

Just my views for what they are worth.