portfolio

My Moneything Investment Experience after 13 Months

wiseclerk 2 Comments

Last year I started investing on British p2p lending marketplace Moneything. Read my past article about opening a Moneything account. Moneything mostly offers property backed loans, with a few different asset-backed deals in between. I used Transferwise and Currencyfair to deposit money from my Euro account. Recently I also used the Revolut App to transfer money from another UK p2p lending marketplace to Moneything.

Looking back over the past year my experience with investing on Moneything has been very good. I am invested in 31 loans right now, mostly at 12% interest rate with small amounts also at 10.5%, 11% and 13% invested. I have had no defaults and there are no fees for investors. The website functions well and support is reported to be very responsive (I actually did not need it yet). The secondary market is extremly liquid, loan parts often sell within second. The only two minor downsides of the Moneything platforms for me are that investor demand by far outstrip loan offers. And there is no autoinvest, so usually it is necessary to login shortly after 4pm UK to invest into new loans. My yield (self calculated with XIRR) so far is 12.0% in GBP. However due to currency fluctuation in EUR it is only 7.2% at the moment.

So if all is great, why did I not invest more? Well, I planned to, but shortly after I started, Brexit vote took me by surprise and I abandonned my plans to ramp up my investment amount, due to the higher currency volatility uncertainty. Instead I am now mainly reinvesting funds and in addition add funds already in GBP, which I move over from other UK platforms via Revolut.

Earlier this month Moneything gained full FCA approval. This is the prerequisite for launching an IFISA product, which allows tax-free investing for UK investors (compare IFISA providers in our database). Surprisingly Moneything just said, they are in no hurry to launch an IFISA offer but rather wants to built loan originations first. This makes sense because the increased deposit influx by an IFISA offer would imbalance demand and supply even further.

Finbee Experiences – My Portfolio Review

wiseclerk 2 Comments

A year has passed since I last wrote about the portfolio I built on Finbee. For a detailed description of this Lithuanian p2p lending marketplace see my earlier review. As described there, I invested mostly in the highest risk grade loans (‘D’ loans). Currently I have invested 1,027 Euro in 35 loans. 32 are current (965 Euro), 2 are late (23 Euro) and one is in default (38 Euro), but rates for this loan are paid to me by Finbee’s compensation fund. The average interest rate of my loan parts is 31%. Interim I had grown my portfolio to up to 3,000 Euro invested, but interest rates have decreased due to high investor demand that was not met by comparable growth on the borrower side, so I have withdrawn 2,604 Euro meanwhile.

My results so far

My self calculated yield (XIRR) is 31.5%. This is the highest I achieved on any p2p lending marketplace over a longer duration of time. This includes the 110 Euro capital gain caused by sales of loans on the secondary market with premiums (see my article on trading on Finbee’s secondary market). Calculating the result again, this time with assuming a full write-off of the defaulted loan gives a yield of 29.4%.

Finbee Portfolio
Screenshot of my Finbee dashboard – click to enlarge

There are 19,930 Euro (as of March 13th) in the Finbee Compensation Fund. Current estimate is that the fund is paying about 9,000 Euro per month on defaulted loans and has decreased about 2,000 Euro from February to March. To grow the amount in the Compensation Fund Finbee will need to increase the volume of new loan originations. I looked into the list of open loan requests this morning and there are currently only 3 consumer loans and 2 business loans open for funding.

Finbee recently added business loans to SMEs, but I have not invested in any of these.

Fellow Finance P2P Lending – My Portfolio and Strategy

wiseclerk 6 Comments

Fellow Finance is a p2p lending marketplace in Finland. It started 2013 with loans to Finnish consumers, and later added Polish consumer loans and loans to Finnish SME’s. Since launch more than 100 million EUR in loans were funded. See earlier blog coverage on Fellow Finance by P2P-Banking.com.

The basics are:

  • minimum bid is 25 EUR
  • no investor fees (except for 1% fee for selling on secondary market)
  • loans rated from 1 star to 5 stars, interest rates depend largely on this rating, terms up to 7 years
  • underbidding auctions, but in practise most bidding is done by allocator (autoinvest) at a ‘market rate’

I started a small test investment early in 2016, but really started building my portfolio from autumn 2016. Since then I have deposited 4,000 Euro. I currently invest only in Finnish consumer loans and concentrate on 3 and 4 star loans for which the market rates are currently 13% and 15%. The Finnish consumer loans are covered by a buyback guarantee of 70%, meaning in case they are 90 days overdue, they will be sold for 70% of outstanding principal to a collection agency.

My investment on Fellow Finance is conducted solely through the allocator (the autoinvest) function.

Allocator settings
My current Fellow Finance allocator settings – click to enlarge

Basically for me Fellow Finance is a mostly hands-off investment running on autopilot. I do log in at least bi-weekly to check if the market rates have changed. The market rates do fluctate sometimes at +/- 1%, and I felt it necessary to tweak the rate of my allocator then to keep it bidding (at the best possible rate). Fellow Finance is one of the very few platforms, where investors can configure the autoinvest to buy on the secondary market, but I have not used that. Also so far I feel no need to use the secondary market for selling. While several of my loans have gone late, they all catched up and none have defaulted. But my portfolio is still very young so it is bound to happen sometime in the future. The Fellow Finance statistics page gives figures for past loss rates by credit grades. It also shows that interest rate levels have sunk sharply in the end of 2015, beginning of 2016 – I guess I should have started to use this marketplace earlier.

Getting money deployed can take a while, as a lot of the bids (loan reservations) are cancelled. I started with 25 EUR bids by the allocator but to speed deployment up, I increased my maximum bid size to 60 Euro.

Overall the website – which is available in english language – is good, only sometimes a tad slow to respond. A mobile is needed to receive SMS codes to confirm some actions.

My plan it to increase my portfolio by another 1,000 Euro, bringing it to 5,000 and then to reinvest proceeds and see how it develops over time.

What are your Fellow Finance experiences? There are over 150 posts on the German investor’s Fellow Finance forum thread. Reviews there are mostly positive in tone.

Fellow Finance portfolio dashboard
My Fellow Finance portfolio dashboard

 

Lendix Review – First Repayment

wiseclerk

Since my p2p lending investments are heavily concentrated on UK and Baltic services, one of my New Year’s resolution for 2017 was to diversify into other markets. Therefore in January I opened an account at French p2p lending service Lendix. Lendix is a p2p lending marketplace offering loans to SMEs in France and Spain (read earlier articles on Lendix). It is one of the larger players in continental Europe. Signing up was straightforward. While the minimum bid on loans is just 20 EUR, the minimum amount for deposits and withdrawals is 100 EUR. Investors can deposit either via bank transfer or via credit card (limited amount). Depositing via credit card is a nice feature which is rarely offered by p2p lending services. I like it because I can react within a minute to new loan announcement emails. This is necessary too, as many new loans are fully funded within an hour – and there is no autoinvest. Nearly all actions require two factor authorisation by a code sent to my mobile.

Lendix loan ratingLendix loans carry interest rates from 4 to 9.9% and are for loan terms between 3 and 84 months. There is no fee for investors and no withholding tax for foreign residents. Each loan is assigned a rating score of A, B or C by Lendix. There is also a detailed loan description for each loan. While most of the site is available in English language, loan descriptions and contracts are in French language only.

So far Lendix has done a very good job in vetting borrower applications. The default rate to date is low – only 0.11%. However the marketplace is young and growing and I expect the default rate to rise with time. Also it remains to be seen, if the perfomance of the Spanish loan will be comparable to the French loans.

As there is no secondary market, investors are bound hold the loan to maturity.

Review of my Lendix portfolio

I only just started in January. I concentrated on A and B grade loans, putting 100 EUR in most of them and 20 EUR in those that seemed not as convincing to me (e.g. a loan to a hotel that, when I looked it up on a hotel booking comparision site, had less satisfied customer reviews than the four other competing hotels in the same village). I skipped the new spanish loans.

Right now I have invested 640 EUR in 8 Lendix loans. I would have invested more, but I found the dealflow to be rather sparse in January and February. My average interest rate is 5.9%. This month I received my first repayment rate. Experiences of more seasoned investors report that repayments are usually on-time.

New investors get 20 EUR cashback bonus from Lendix when signing up via this link, once they have invested at least 500 EUR.

 

Lendix loan portfolio
Screenshot of my Lendix loan portfolio – click for larger view

 

Two Years Into P2P Lending Investment at Bondora – My Portfolio Review

wiseclerk 4 Comments

In October 2012 I started p2p lending at Bondora. Since then I periodically wrote on my experiences – you can read my last blog article here. Since the start I did deposit 14,000 Euro (approx. 17,800 US$). My portfolio is very much diversified. Most loan parts I hold are for loan terms between 36 and 60 months. Together the loans add up to 17,924 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 2,084 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 1,327 Euro principal is stuck in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 7,608 Euro in repaid principal back (which I reinvested).


Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status

At the moment I have 430 Euro in bids in open market listings and 394 Euro cash available. Continue reading →

Review of My Current Bondora Portfolio – First Experiences in Trading Bondora+ Loans

wiseclerk 6 Comments

I started p2p lending at Bondora (formerly Isepankur) in the end of 2012. Since then I periodically wrote on my experiences – you can read my last report here. Since the start have deposited 13,000 Euro (approx. 17,600 US$). My portfolio is very diversified. Most loan parts I hold are for loan terms between 36 and 60 months. Together the loans add up to 15,610 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 1,579 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 888 Euro are in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 6,212 Euro in repaid principal back (which I reinvested).

Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status

Right now I have a high amount of cash in the account – 1,144 Euro. I’ll explain what led to this situation later on.


Chart 2: Screenshot of account balance

Return on Invest

Currently Isepankur shows my ROI to be over 28.8% (sidenote: I and several others observed that trading had no impact on the ROI shown. Then our ROI suddenly jumped on June 19th; we assume Bondora changed the calculation then to account (better?) for capital gains; here is an example of a portfolio with very big impact of trading). In my own calculations, using XIRR in Excel, I currently get a 25.9% ROI. Even if I assume that 50% of my 60+days overdue will not be recovered (past recovery rates reported by Bondora have been high) my ROI still calculates to 23.2% . Continue reading →