Review: My P2P Lending Portfolio May 2019

May 17, 2019January 13, 2020 wiseclerk 7 Comments

I covered my p2p lending portfolio periodically over the past 12 years in this blog. The following report is a snapshot on how it is composed right now (May 2019) and which strategy I will take for the next months. As you can see below I aim for a widespread diversification (over different platforms as well as geographically) of my p2p lending investments.

Mintos

Mintos* is my biggest position. I run a trading strategy on Mintos. Mintos gives my net annual return as 15.1%. Calculating it myself based on the deposits and withdrawals I get a XIRR value of 24.8%. The cause for the huge discrepancy is that Mintos does not account correctly for the cashback of the campaigns. I heavily traded, when Mogo ran a campaign. For example I invested in new Mogo loans that were offered with a 2% cashback on the primary market, nearly instantly sold them with 1.8% discount on the secondary market and pocketed the cashback. Rinse and repeat.

I am satisfied with the current degree of diversification over loan originators in my Mintos portfolio. The bulk of my investments is in loan terms between 3 and 30 months at interest rates ranging from 13% to 15%. The lower interest rate loans are usually only held temporary as part of my trading strategy.

For the coming month I plan to keep my Mintos* investment at roughly that amount, reinvesting the paid principal and interest.
New investors registering via this link at Mintos, get 1% cashback on amounts invested in the first 90 days. Mintos is currently not accepting UK investors.

Linked Finance

My second largest p2p investment is on Irish SME loan platform Linked Finance.

Diversification achieved is good. The majority of my loans have interest rates between 8% and 11%. Most loan terms are 2 or 3 years.

I “collected” 7 loans in default (double dip on the golf loan). But 5 of these had repaid more than half the principal before they want into the default state so the principal in default sums up to only 270 Euro. My self-calulated XIRR value is 6.4% if I totally write off the amounts in default and 7.1% if I assume that half the amount in default will be recovered. I plan to slightly increase my Linked Finance* portfolio in the next months. Linked Finance is not offering any cashback or bonus rewards for new investors.

Bondora

Bondora is my third largest and oldest (still running) p2p lending portfolio. I started in 2012. My self calculated XIRR value is 16.6%. A yield that high is not achievable nowadays anymore. My portfolio profited heavily from the first years when interest rates were typically 28% to 34%.

I am currently investing into Estonian A and B loans using these autoinvest settings. I have used these settings unchanged for 11 months now and it is running totally hands-off with no maintenance required.

On Bondora* I reinvest the bulk of my repayments and occasionaly withdraw some funds. New investors registering on Bondora using this link get a 5 Euro sign-up bonus.

Ratesetter Australia

Ratesetter Australia* is my fourth largest p2p investment and also one of my youngest. I started in August 2018. My XIRR value self calculated in AUD is 9,1% if I include the 75 AUD sign-up bonus and 7.4% if I do not include that.

My money is mostly invested on the Ratesetter 5 year market at an average rate of 9.2% (that is after fees but before withholding tax).

In the past months the interest rates have dropped considerably therefore I am parking some funds on the 1 month market or invest them on the 3 year market.

I am reinvesting all repayments at Ratesetter Australia. If rates go up again I plan to do that on the 5 year market, otherwise I’ll settle for the 3 year market. It is a little complicated to register as a non-resident, but I have described how I managed to sign up as a European here. New investors can earn a 75 AUD promotion bonus by investing 2,000 AUD or more in our 3 year Income or 5 year Income lending markets before 31st May 2019. Achieving that requirement in time will not be easy, even if you start directly.

Iuvo Group

The fifth largest position of my p2p portfolio is invested at Iuvo. It is running hands-off and does not require any maintenance.

I continue to reinvest all repayments. Iuvo pays new investors a very generous cashback of up to 90 EUR. For more details and how to get it see the cashback overview page.

Estateguru

After I completely exited Lendy in last autumn, baltic Estateguru* is now my largest platform for property secured loans. I don’t use the autoinvest. Instead I periodically login and manually invest into a new Estonian loan secured by a first rank mortgage.

I mostly reinvest all repayments. New investors get 0.5% cashback for all investments in the first 90 days, if they sign up using this link.

Fellow Finance

I used to have a larger portfolio at finnish Fellow Finance but I did not want to go below 12% for 4 star Finnish consumer loans therefore I started withdrawing funds last year. In January the sale price collections paid tor Finnish loans dropped from 70% to 53% which reinforced my decision to exit.

October

I am running down my portfolio on French SME loan marketplace October. With the low interest rates and rising defaults (6 out of 52 loans) in my portfolio the risk reward ratio is not for my taste anymore.

New investors signing up on October using this link* can get 20 EUR bonus (200 Euro minimum investment)

More p2p lending marketplaces

Due to professional interest (want to gain first hand experience) and curiosity I have more p2p lending portfolios at Ablrate* (small, reinvesting), Assetz Capital* (tiny, reinvesting, possibly increasing), Bulkestate* (tiny, testing), Crowdestate* (small, reinvesting), Finbee* (tiny, nearly exited), Investly (small, reinvesting), Lenndy* (tiny, watching), Monestro, (tiny, exiting), Moneything* (small, exiting), Neofinance* (small, testing, probably running down), Reinvest24* (small, testing), Robocash* (small, reinvesting), Zlty Melon* (tiny, exiting next month when terms are up).

Crowdinvesting

Not p2p lending but investing in startups. I am a huge fan of Seedrs*. Investing in startups is of course even higher risk than investing in p2p lending. Nevertheless I went ahead and built a big Seedrs portfolio over the last years. Snapshot:

P2P Conference Riga

I am looking forward to be at the P2P Conference in Riga* which is less than 4 weeks away. The conference is reasonably priced (enter promotional code P2PEARLYBIRD40 for 40% rebate) and Riga can be reached with cheap flights from many European cities. BTW, Riga is an interesting town, if you have not been there yet you could combine the conference with some sightseeing.

Year-End Review of my Mintos Results in 2018 and Outlook for 2019

December 28, 2018January 13, 2020 wiseclerk 11 Comments

I started investing on the p2p lending marketplace Mintos* in January 2015. Nearly 4 years have passed. Most of the time my strategy was buy-and-hold, that is I invested in loans with the intention to hold them till maturity. That’s also what I had been doing at the majority of other p2p lending platforms. In the beginning of the year I had a large chunk of high-interest, longer-term Mogo car loans, together with some mid/longer-term loans of other originators on Mintos. After many of the Mogo loans were bought back in summer I decided to switch to a completly different strategy on Mintos*. Thereafter I concentrated on trading, that is buying loans on the secondary market and selling them at a higher price on the secondary market again, usually holding these loans only for a short time frame.

WhenÂ Mintos* introduced the Secondary Market Autoinvest Feature in October my strategy got a boost.

So how did it go?

Summary of my account statement for 4th quarter 2018 – click on image for larger view

As you can see in the screenshot above I made 712.80 EUR profit from trading (buying and selling) loans in the fourth quarter. Compare that to the 127.14 EUR (101.74+25.40) interest earned. Obviously trading has been much more profitable. I consider it not much riskier than my previous buy and hold strategy as I was able to maintain a reasonable level of diversification over several investors. But of course investing on Mintos is high risk anyway.

Which loans did I select for trading?

It all comes down to buying cheap and selling at a higher price. My experience is that this works best with mid-term, EUR BB loans. With short term or very long term loans the impact of premiums und discount is to high / to low on the YTM for a good turn-around of inventory.

Below is a snapshot of the loans currently in my Mintos* portfolio today – of course the composition changes very frequently with this strategy. It can be observed that loan ranges between 18 and 42 months dominate my portfolio, which consists of 478 indiviudal loan parts. Also loans with 13% and higher interest rates are overweighted.

This trading strategy worked very well for me in the past quarter. It would probably not scale, if an investor tried to deploy much more capital, as loan supply that matches my criteria for buying is limited and competition is increasing.

The Net Annual Return (NAR value) Mintos displays for my return has been constantly increasing this quarter and today is at 14.74%. Remember this is calculated for the whole time since I started investing, so since January 2015. If I would calculate this figure only for this quarter results, it would be much higher.

Screenshot Dec. 28th, 2018

So what to expect in 2019?

Interest rates on Mintos* have been fluctating over the past years. In the last months they have risen considerably. Possibly a seasonal effect. I have no idea whether they can rise a little further still, or have peaked and will fluctate back in the other direction for a few month. Also the economic cycle might turn.

I will stick to my buying and selling strategy for now and for this strategy supply and demand on the secondary market is much more important than whether the interest rates are 1 or 2% higher or lower as most of my result is generated from secondary market gains rather than interest earned.

Also I am acutely aware of the risk that the huge number of originators pose. Even if Mintos does a good job of vetting and monitoring the originators, the sheer number of originators statistically means that chances that one of them might get into financial trouble are not neglectabe. For indivual investors the only viable measure to have some protection (and to reduce losses in that case) is diversification across several originators.

I do hope that 2019 will be a very profitable year for Mintos* investors!

New investors signing up via this link on Mintos*, get 1% cashbark on all investments they make in the first 90 days after registration.

My P2P Lending Investment Portfolio at Bondora is now 5 Years Old

November 22, 2017 wiseclerk 5 Comments

Wow, 5 years have passed since I first started to invest into p2p lending at Bondora in October 2012. I periodically review my experiences in this blog – you can read my last update here. Over the total time I did deposit 14,000 Euro and withdrew 17,800 Euro.Â So over time I withdrew more than I ever deposited, meaning 3,800 Euro realized profit. Even better: I still have 604 loans in my Bondora portfolio with an outstanding principal of 7,467 Euro at an average interest rate of 23.78%. Of these 2,746 Euro are in current loans, 778 Euro in overdue loans and 3,941 Euro in 60+ days overdue loans. Some of this very overdue loans do in fact make very regular monthly payments, albeit smaller than the planned payments in the original payment schedule – it will take much longer for the loan to be repaid. And of course many of my red loans are duds, which haven’t made a single repayment and it is unlikely any recovery will be achieved. There is 43 Euro cash in the account.

Bondora shows a net return of 19.0% for my portfolio. In my own calculations, using XIRR in Excel, assuming that 30% of my 60+days overdue and 15% of my overdue loans will not be recovered, my ROI calculations result in 17.2% return. Even if I assume total loss on all outstanding loans that are 60+days overdue my ROI calculation results in 15.6%

Let’s look how my remaining portfolio is distributed by several criteria

Chart 1: My portfolio by country; majority in Estonian loans, remainder in Finnish loans

Chart 2: My portfolio by rating: more than half of the amount in B and C rated loans, large portions also in A and D ratings

Current situation at Bondora

New investors cannot expect to achieve similar yields. Interest rates are much lower now than when I started and I achieved a portion of my profit by trading loans on the secondary market at premium.
If you want to start on theÂ Bondora p2p lending marketplace now, consider using the Portfolio Pro autoinvest set to Estonian loans only with AA to B (or C) credit grades. Maybe try some Finnish loans with better credit grades too.

Bondora originates roughly 3 million Euro new loans per month. There is no cash drag, usually available amounts get invested very fast.

Chart 3: Cumulative all time development of my portfolio by credit grades 2012-2017. Remember I only deposited 14,000 Euro. The high 76,698 Euro given as total investment is a result of reinvestments and active buying and selling of loans.

My Bondmason Result After Exit – Yield was Mediocre

September 22, 2017 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.

Review of My Linked Finance Investment After 6 Months

August 15, 2017 wiseclerk 4 Comments

Six months ago I started a portfolio on Irish p2p lending platform Linked Finance. As my overall p2p lending investment was heavy on Baltic and UK platforms I wanted to diversify geographically. And Linked Finance is an established player. The marketplace started 4 years ago and attracted institutional capital earlier this year.

Linked Finance offers loans to Irish SMEs; click for larger image

I started in February with a 1,000 Euro deposit via SEPA transfer. Loans on Linked Finance have terms of either 12, 24 or 36 months and are assigned credit grades by Linked Finance. Both together determine the interest rate.

I use the Autobid (autoinvest function) to invest. While it is possible to make manual bids, many of the smaller loans are funded in minutes.

My Linked Finance autobid settings – Click for larger view

Over time I have done multiple deposits and increased my total deposited investment to 6,350 Euro. The processes are smooth, there have been no bugs and Linked Finance is a most hands-off platform requiring almost no attention by me. Loan supply is a little volatile. It has slowed down in summer. However most loans are for 36 months; due to my autobid settings I skip many of those.

My Linked Finance dashboard – click to enlarge

The best part of my Linked Finance experience is that so far all payments have been made on time. Certainly I expect that there will be delays and defaults, but I appreciate that there have been none so far and this confirms the very low overall default rate Linked Finance shows in its statistics

The only disadvantages of Linked Finance are:

1.2% fee for investors
No secondary market

My self calculated ROI so far is 5.6% (XIRR), but some of that is due to the initial cash drag and this figure will rise. I plan to further increase my Linked Finance investment to a portfolio size of 10K.

Another, very recently launched Irish p2p lending marketplace is Flender, which currently runs a 10% cashback promotion (minimum investment of 2,500 Euro to be eligible). Investors that want todiversify their investment across p2p lending marketplaces in Europe find a list of options here.

My Lendy Experience – Portfolio Review After 2 Years Investing

April 27, 2017June 16, 2017 wiseclerk 4 Comments

When I started in late 2014 the UK p2p lending marketplace Lendy was still called Saving Stream, but it rebranded this year. Lendy is a platform offering bridge loans secured by property. I last reviewed my portfolio performance here on the blog in January 2016. Since then the following major changes have taken place at Lendy:

Different interest rates
Initially all loans had carried 12% interest. Now Lendy assigns different interest rates to each loan. Interest range for investors on new loans now are in the range between 7 and 12%.
Lendy sold the security of the second defaulted loan (Garden Center). While all lenders got principal and interest paid on this loan, the sale price of the security was below the loan amount. Lendy covered the shortfall from own funds (provision fund).
Since March 2017 investor can not buy loans on the secondary market and deposit funds afterwards (this still is possible on the primary market). This has reduced liquidity of the secondary market somewhat, but in general it is still pretty liquid for those loans that have a middle to long remaining term.
Since April 2017 there is a new default policy in effect. For loans more than 90 days overdue interest continues to accrue but will not be paid until Lendy has received payment by the borrower. All loans more than 180 days overdue are now automatically classified as default loans. The number of defaulted loans has risen to 14 at the time of this writing.

Especially the last point has triggered debates on the chances for recovery and there are concerns voiced among investors about to optimistic valuations. The secondary market swings from time to time between mosty empty (except for loans in default) and plenty.

My portfolio

I have continued to ramp up my portfolio reinvesting returns and making new deposits via Transferwise and Currencyfair. This was before the Brexit decision. As for now I am simply reinvesting. My portfolio amount is 10K GBP spread out over 14 different loans. The vast majority is in 12% interest rate loans. I have made three exceptions in the past, but usually only with low amounts and when rebalancing the portfolio, I try to sell these lower interest loans first. So far I have not had any loans in overdue or default state – but there are many of those on the platform (see above). My loans have long remaining terms with the shortest being 147 days at the moment.

My yield (self calculated with XIRR) so far is 12.1% in GBP. Unfortunately I deposited most funds during the time when the pound was at a high, therefore calculated in Euro currency the yield is only 4.4% for me.

Lendy is still one of my preferred p2p lending marketplaces, due to interest rates, real estate as a security and liquidity. I do see the risks in the valuations, but I figure that at least the security will cover part of the loan amount and will with a high probability prevent total loss in a defaulted loan. I might get more picky in selecting loans, but so far Lendy for me is actually a platform that requires less management and monitoring than several other marketplaces I use.

Screenshot of top of my loan portfolio list at Lendy – click for larger view

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