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Post by wiseclerk on Oct 12, 2016 20:44:39 GMT
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david42
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Post by david42 on Oct 13, 2016 7:45:33 GMT
Neil_P2PBlog Thank you for the interesting review of your experience. I would be interested to hear how long the sellout took. Your blog currently says: "Day 3: [will update]" Thank you David
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Post by stevefindlay on Oct 13, 2016 19:07:45 GMT
I did a write up of my experiences investing in BondMason over the last 3 months in this review here. It starts with an introduction and explanation of the service and the second half is my experience. Note that this is likely a different experience to those investing larger sums of money (e.g. £5k+). Would be interested to see if others had a similar ratio of fees: gross returns as me (~20%). I think this is a very fair and balanced blog post. Thank you for taking the time to try us out, and review our service in detail. Much appreciated. Your blog has highlighted a point which we've discussed elsewhere in this forum - namely the impact of rounding when comparing fees to return, particularly for smaller investors. And as per wiseclerk observation, the ratio of your gross return to our fees should really be about 8:1. So, we will do the following: - we will sort the rounding out, so that both fees and interest round in the same direction, to ensure the fee ratio stays in balance, and - we will look at investors accounts when they withdraw funds to see what there ratio is, and if it is out of kilter (because of rounding) then we may apply discretion to waive some of our fees to bring these closer to 8:1. We appreciate the feedback, and helping to make our service better for all clients.
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dermot
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Post by dermot on Oct 25, 2016 19:14:33 GMT
The new diversification algorithm seemed to work well for a while, my 5 figure sum being fully invested on 22nd Sept.
A number of shorter loans completed soon afterwards and I've mostly been hovering at around 80% invested since.
Still reasonably happy with the platform as a whole and will give it a little while longer before pulling out the un-invested funds; in the managed accounts on Assetz, one does at least get 3.75% on 'un-invested' funds, but a lot of the reason behind moving some funds to BM was simply for a degree of diversification.
I'm otherwise generally quite happy with AC and BM as homes for my lower interest rate P2P funds.
I realise I sound a bit like a single-issue voter here, but one thing that would encourage me to leave more funds with BM would be a facility - like RS has - to automatically draw, say, interest only on a monthly basis for income supplementation (preferentially drawing from uninvested funds first, of course).
The slightly Byzantine tax situation with regards to the fee structure is a bit of a turn-off - will the annual tax statement from BM accurately reflect this, or do we have to pull our calculators out if we are in the 40% and above bracket?
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Post by stevefindlay on Oct 28, 2016 13:58:12 GMT
I realise I sound a bit like a single-issue voter here, but one thing that would encourage me to leave more funds with BM would be a facility - like RS has - to automatically draw, say, interest only on a monthly basis for income supplementation (preferentially drawing from uninvested funds first, of course). The slightly Byzantine tax situation with regards to the fee structure is a bit of a turn-off - will the annual tax statement from BM accurately reflect this, or do we have to pull our calculators out if we are in the 40% and above bracket? Automated monthly interest withdrawal: this is in the pipeline. Tax: we supply tax statements automatically the day after the tax year end (April 5th). These appear on your My Summary dashboard page. For any clients that have invested through a Company and have different tax year ends, they are invited to email us to ask for their tax statements.
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Post by stevefindlay on Jan 4, 2017 20:57:14 GMT
We have updated our statistics page with performance for 2016: www.bondmason.com/statisticsYou may like to take a look if you are considering deploying funds through BondMason. Please ask if you have any questions: invest@bondmason.com |
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Post by stevefindlay on Jan 4, 2017 21:16:07 GMT
Re: Cash Drag "Cash drag is the impact of un-invested cash on the overall returns for a client." and "... we've calculated an average cash drag of 90% ..." Appreciate that there is more to come in that section, but doesn't that make unnecessarily scary reading? Hopefully so. We don't want to overstate performance though, and although we target 98%+ investment levels (as well as an average of 92-98% in our models), I think, looking back at 2016, because Investor demand significantly exceeded our expectations, this impacted cash drag. And 90% probably feels about right for the second half of 2016 for at least a quarter of clients. Remember, this is backward-looking, not forward looking. We have lots planned on the allocation front for 2017 and aim to do much better than 90%. Let's see...
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Post by eascogo on Jan 4, 2017 22:02:59 GMT
Re: Cash Drag "Cash drag is the impact of un-invested cash on the overall returns for a client." and "... we've calculated an average cash drag of 90% ..." Appreciate that there is more to come in that section, but doesn't that make unnecessarily scary reading? Hopefully so. We don't want to overstate performance though, and although we target 98%+ investment levels (as well as an average of 92-98% in our models), I think, looking back at 2016, because Investor demand significantly exceeded our expectations, this impacted cash drag. And 90% probably feels about right for the second half of 2016 for at least a quarter of clients. Remember, this is backward-looking, not forward looking. We have lots planned on the allocation front for 2017 and aim to do much better than 90%. Let's see... It seems the wording has distorted the meaning causing unnecessary angst. Yes cash drag stands for uninvested money but the 90% in question represent money deployed. Anxiety over. 
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Post by wiseclerk on Jan 17, 2017 22:01:04 GMT
My portfolio today shows 5 invoice discounting loans as "Default" in Loan Status. I hope that either this is a technical glitch or that the amounts will be recovered. We shall see.
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treeman
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Post by treeman on Jan 17, 2017 22:52:14 GMT
My portfolio today shows 5 invoice discounting loans as "Default" in Loan Status. I hope that either this is a technical glitch or that the amounts will be recovered. We shall see. Your post made me curious so just had a look - and found one of mine (invoice discounting too) shows as 'Default'. I share your hopes re recovery...... Also, the tooltip appearing when hovering on the blue tick icon in the Loan Status column shows 'Full' on all except about three which say 'Secondary' and one which says 'processing'....... stevefindlay - could you explain what these tooltip terms refer to ?
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Greenwood2
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Post by Greenwood2 on Jan 18, 2017 7:32:03 GMT
I've got a red too. Also I'm sure I could sort by loan status before but I can't now.
It would have been nice if Steve had given a heads up on the defaults!
Edit: Could we get defaults added somewhere on the summary page.
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Post by stevefindlay on Jan 18, 2017 8:27:48 GMT
I think that's good feedback that we should signal defaults on the summary page as well. We will add this.
A couple of things on defaults:
- You are always welcome to drop us a line (phone or email) with respect to any loan reference to enquire about its status. Because of confidentiality its a little difficult for us to always provide exact details, but that shouldn't stop us from being able to give you the latest position on a loan. (PS: we may add a thread here with notes on any defaults)
- To date, we've had 19 go into default (of which 18 have been invoice discount finance), of these:
- 11 have had full recovery (because the majority of our loans are asset backed and/or insured we do expect to get a good level of recoveries)
- 2 have had 50% recovery (50% write off), totalling c.£900 written off
- 6 are still in recovery.
Of the 6 still in recovery:
- 1 we have significant concerns over
- 1 we think may lead to a partial write off and/or be slow to repay
- 4 are still early-ish in their process and we would like to see a good outcome.
The total value of all loans in default is less than 0.3% of the loans outstanding.
By volume, we have 800+ live loans, so less than 1% by volume in default (we take smaller positions in invoice discount finance loans on average as they can be bumpier).
One final point - we hate 'living dead' loans. It is much better to recover as much as possible as quickly as possible, even if this leads to a loss - rather than hope / pretend everything will be alright in the end, and lose everything.
As a rule of thumb:
- Property bridging and development loans: any extension of more than 90 days is a significant concern to us (the security should be seized at this point). If the developer wants more time than this, then they should refinance us out and arrange a new loan facility.
- Invoice discount finance: anything more than 30 days over the later of the invoice date and the estimated payment date
- Corporate loans: any late payments over 2 days.
You may also like to see our statistics page (www.bondmason.com/statistics)
Many thanks,
Steve
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Post by eascogo on Jan 18, 2017 16:47:45 GMT
... we hate 'living dead' loans. It is much better to recover as much as possible as quickly as possible, even if this leads to a loss - rather than hope / pretend everything will be alright in the end, and lose everything. As a rule of thumb: - Property bridging and development loans: any extension of more than 90 days is a significant concern to us (the security should be seized at this point). If the developer wants more time than this, then they should refinance us out and arrange a new loan facility. ... It would be good if fundingsecure were to add this to their rules of practice.
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stub8535
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personal opinions only. Not qualified to advise on investment products.
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Post by stub8535 on Jan 18, 2017 17:36:09 GMT
Steve. What pressure can you apply to platforms, through which you have presumably made the investments on our behalf, to resolve issues that breach your concern criteria?
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cooling_dude
Bye Bye's for the PPI
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Post by cooling_dude on Jan 18, 2017 19:41:45 GMT
Can I just say that is is absolutely sodding marvellous to see a platform provide a comprehensive and honest reply to what is a difficult issue for some platforms to discuss (i.e. defaults) No shying away from the question, no silence, no BS post with little information. Hats off to you BondMason / stevefindlay - keep up the good work  |
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