Brand New To P2P Investing and Looking for Guidance

It was an unusually long set of questions, and certainly the first ones I have encountered that included 'How long is Odin's beard'. 

Most experienced P2P investors would tend towards the higher risk bands, rightly or wrongly. Given failure is often catastrophic rather than minor it is a balanced risk, so I would not be surprised to see that.

That it is still available may in itself say something.

I think the reason for such slow funding of a small loan is that not many people know about this new site. It is too new. No surprise there.  I remember few years back such loans were filled within less than a minute, despite the £25 max bid restriction is place.

Note that the lower risk tranche is significantly larger than the other two. This could be one of the reasons why tranche C (£600) was gone very quickly.

The tranches choice is not uncommon throughout  2p2, not all platforms use it, and not all loans on platforms that do, have it offered.

You did get a variety of opinions, and some agree with you. Everyone has an opinion and there is a lot of disagreement or at least interpretation of and tolerance of risk. Also I feel a bit of a short memory by some of what happened to the 12%+ platforms, I don't want to go down the same rabbit hole again.

Agreed.

And the important thing  - very important, imo -  is to understand what the order of priority is for repayments in the event of default.

Most platforms I'm aware of which offer tranches, structure their default repayments in one of two ways:


This is particularly key when considering loans on a platform's Secondary Market; especially when the up-front interest has been stripped out and the loan is listed by those wishing to avoid 'term-risk'.  There is - again, imo - no point taking a later-life Tranche C loan offered on an SM, having been perhaps attracted by the higher rate of interest, if Tranche A and B's Capital and Interest is going to be repaid before Tranche C's Capital, let alone interest.  Defaulted loans can take years to redeem and all the while interest on the higher ranked Tranches accrues, the probability that Tranche C receives any Capital diminishes by the day.

I think platforms could improve their Ts&Cs by making the 'default repayments' section a lot clearer; using a numerical illustration rather than just relying on (potentially ambiguous) wording would go along way, imo.

For what it's worth (a big fat zero, obvs), I'd only invest in Tranche A of loans which fell into the first camp, whether primary or secondary market.

I do like the idea of the 3 tranches as it allows even more flexibility for investment. I would imagine that if and when more investors sign up on here that these sort of loans will fill a lot more quickly than it Currently takes as well.
Looking around a few other sites it appears to be property that most other sites deal with.