How far should SavingStream cut interest rates?

Well I've gone for 8% - just a shot in the dark. I think the popularity of SS is with large scale investors (£10k plus) because there is no investment limit in place.

The likes of FS and MT with their 24 hour bidding limits are more suitable for small time investors, like myself, who are trying to build up a diversified portfolio and just investing a couple of hundred at a time.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not saying I would invest at 8%, just that figure **might** deter some of the large scale investors - there again it might not

I don't use them so am a bystander. Nonetheless I would hope that one would like to be pricing to risk, not simply demand. 

I don't think a rate cut is the right approach.  It's certainly not the only possible approach.  Personally I think they should close to new money until demand increases or there are withdrawals.

Given the current oversupply of funds, IMHO the easiest ways to solve that are to either increase the loan volume, or make the product less attractive to investors, either by decreasing the returns or by taking on lower quality loans.

However, I have a feeling that investors may well be rather fickle (especially given that many seem to have access to large amounts of funds within 24h), and if the product is not longer viewed as the best of its type, this could be disastrous for the platform. For example, there has been a steady supply of short term (6-9 month) property loans on FC recently, typically offering around 10% interest, often with 1 or 2% cashback. Even after FC's 1% fees, many of these (including the cashback) work out at around 10-11% return, so if SS dropped rates even 1% then you might see a flood of current SS investors going for the property loans on FC. Also the figure of 1% per month fits well with the simplistic style of the platform.

NB - other platforms may well offer similar as well, I've not researched it thoroughly

This poll is a waste of time, who in their right mind would invest for less

So I'm guessing you haven't been with any p2p platforms long enough to watch the rates drop as the market forces go to work when lenders out-supply borrowers then?   Happens with a sad but inevitable regularity as platforms mature.  Of course more and more p2p platforms are coming on-line all the time to meet the demand, so that might have the effect of evening things out for a while.  Millions and millions of people invest for less.  On p2p platforms, many hundreds continue to invest as the rates drop.

It's perhaps a badly-headlined poll becasue I'm guessing none of us want the rate to drop, and I'd be amongst the ones who would pull out if they did, but a discussion about what rate might even out the supply and demand is of some interest - but I don't think the poll's going to achieve that unfortunately.

E mail out, poll useless.