bondmason

My Bondmason Result After Exit – Yield was Mediocre

wiseclerk 5 Comments

Last year in September I signed up at UK platform Bondmason in order to test first-hand how an investment of 1,000 GBP would develop. As described in the review article, I wrote when I started, Bondmason is an aggregator that automates the investment across many p2p lending platforms for the investor and takes a fee for that. Bondmason projected a target return of 7% after fees and bad debt.

Allocation of my deposited funds into loans went okay. There was some cash drag, but not as much as other investors have experienced.


Deployment speed of my investment on Bondmason – click for larger image

What was bad, was that it became clear to me, that the interest level in combination with the non-performing loans would make it very unlikely for Bondmason to reach the projected return – at least for my portfolio. Especially with the Invoice Discounting loans there were issues.

In April 2017 Bondmason announced it would require a larger minimum investment amount of 5K (previously 1K) and raise fees for small portfolios to 1.5% (previously 1%). Dang. I was in no way interested to deposit more money. So my portfolio did not even get to celebrate 1st anniversary. In July I gave them notice to liquidate my portfolio/account. Since then I withdrew 1,013.94 GBP – only slightly more than I deposited. My account still exists as there is 20 GBP stuck in two property loans in default and also 1.41 GBP in cash.


My Bondmason result (1) – click for larger image


My Bondmason result (2) – click to enlarge

Regardless of which way I look at it, the result is clearly bad. Obviously Bondmason by far missed the targeted return of 7% in my case.
If I take an optimistic view and just assume, my 2 defaulted loans would recover today and the outstanding amount is paid to me, then my self-calculated yield (XIRR function) would be 4.3%. If I need to write off the 2 loans in default then my self-calculated yield is 1.9%. And that is before tax – as a German resident I cannot offset bad debt against interest earned for tax purposes. And on top of that the pound has been detoriating against the Euro value in the past 12 months (not Bondmason’s fault).

So to sum up: I liked the idea of an aggregator and the Bondmason setup allows passive investing in a diversified mix of p2p loans. But my returns are among the worst I ever experienced on p2p lending platforms and I am certainly happy I conducted this test with 1,000 GBP only and did not risk more.

If you want more details about the development of my portfolio throughout the past year there are more snapshots with screenshots over time in this thread.

 

My Bondmason Test – Review at Start

wiseclerk

bondmason-logoI decided to try out another UK p2p lending service. Bondmason is not a marketplace facilitating loans itself, but rather acts as intermediary steering and automating investments for the users. Bondmason wants to offer an easy way to automatically invest and diversify. To allow this, I need to hand over full control to Bondmason. In return Bondmason projects a target return of 7% after fees and bad debt. Note that the target return is not guaranteed.

Getting started was easy. I deposited the minimum amount of 1,000 GBP. Since I am in the Eurozone I used Transferwise to do this in order to avoid high bank fees. For higher amounts Currencyfair can be cheaper. After two days Bondmason notified me via email that my money arrived. After login I saw that the service already invested 180 GBP in the first 9 selected loans.

Bondmason invests in sme loans, property loans and invoice discounting. Currently Bondmason is using 19 marketplaces, but does not disclose which ones are used arguing IP considerations. Some of them do not seem “typcial” p2p lending marketplaces, as one mentioned example is Fiduciam. As in investor I am only shown nominal interest rate, type of loan and term.

My Bondmason dashboardMy Bondmason dashboard on day 6 after start (click to enlarge)

The information provided is rather minimalistic, there are really only two views. The dashboard view (see above) and the investment view (see below). Regarding parameters there is only the choice whether to reinvest and the diversification setting, which lets me select a maximum of 2% or 1% investment concentration. There is no account statement.

So far Bondmason invested 330 GBP (or 33%) of my cash. The selected loans have nominal interest rates ranging form 6.0% to 14.7% and terms between 1 and 13 months. As an investor I have to fully trust the loan quality and loan selection provided by Bondmason to deliver the promised target return. Since (so far) all my loans are bullet loans, it will take me even longer to find out how high bad debt levels will be in reality. But that’s what this test is for and I’ll continue to report on my Bondmason experiences.

This page gives some more information on the approach of the algorithm in loan allocation. Bondmason targets one third loans with less than 60 days, one third with up to 12 months term and one third over 12 months term for my portfolio. Continue reading →