Use of leverage / margin account to invest in P2P loans

I don't know the best way to get started with futures trading from scratch.  My route in won't help you.  You might try the forum www.trade2win.com which seems to come up with answers in a lot of my searches.

I learnt about futures and options pricing thirty years ago by reading the introductory material from IG Index then reading some of the text books on option pricing theory.  (Wikipedia had not been invented.)  If you stick with futures rather than options, there is less to learn.

When I wanted to gear up my P2P lending, I went back to IG Index because they had provided a lot of support in the past.  Sure enough, as soon as I opened the account I was contacted by someone who said his job was to answer any questions while I got used to the platform.  He gave me some helpful pointers.  IG Index also sent me a lot of training material, which I did not bother to read.  I did not make much use of the demo account.  I just placed a small real bet to start with, so that I could see how the real money worked.

Starting from scratch, you need to learn
- how futures are priced (arbitrage ensures that future price = spot price + financing cost for the time - any dividends to be paid over the time).  Nothing to do with where people think the price might move to.
- how spread betting works.  The demo account can help here.  It is easy to get a factor of ten wrong, or worse, if you fail to understand exactly what you are betting on.  I once placed a bet in the opposite direction to the one I wanted.
- once you understand futures, using them to gear your P2P portfolio is just a matter of deciding on your strategy.
 

Thanks. I'll have a look at these P2P close ended funds, the CFDs on these seem like a great strategy, but 1%-2% B/A spread is really high, for the cost to be reasonable you have to maintain the investment several years. 

I am quite new to IG index and I, too, have been very impressed with the platform and the email and phone support. The bid/offer for the major indices and FX contracts is negligible - i don't know how they do it. The P2P investment trusts are in reality tiny low liquidity companies and 1% bid/offer is probably fair. I gear up on other investments and hold P2P un geared. (Having said that at the moment my gearing is as low as it has been for several years, and cash holdings are my largest for the last two years.)

I also echo Financial Thing in warning that it is easy to make mistakes - I have and I have years of experience in this sort of thing. If you are new I suggest that you pick a couple of shares/ or indices and actually buy and sell a few small amounts. The minimum transaction is usually very small, and on spread betting there is no commission so the cost is small. If you can't afford that small cost you probably should steer clear. Hold shares overnight, see what happens with funding, buy something about to pay a dividend and so on. 

I'm curious how you go about stoozing 0% credit cards for p2p? Most of the sites I currently use will not accept credit cards as a form of funding, instead offering debit card or bank transfer only, Octopus Choice for example, state: 'Unfortunately we don’t accept credit cards, as we’re not allowed to accept investments made with borrowed money.'


Are there any P2P platforms out there that do accept CC's, or is it more a case of funding your P2P indirectly, by putting all the living expenses on the 0% to free up more short-term cash? Either way, would appreciate any pointers from anyone as to how you go about doing this. TIA.