The Sunday Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper, recently had an article that started like this: “Is peer-to-peer lending out of control? There’s certainly some cause for concern.” It cited the industry’s rapid growth as one of the reasons for this worry. To back this up, it quoted…
This is the first article in a new series for 4thWay®, covering investment on the edges of P2P lending. That means alternative ways to invest in the P2P lending sector without lending directly to borrowers yourself. These might either help you spread your risks, manage…
With bond interest rates plummeting to near zero, it is only a matter of time before a lot of people lost money, as was explained in yesterday’s FT article Bond market fireworks flash warning signals. When bond interest rates drop, it means people are paying too…
For most peer-to-peer lending companies, a bad debt amounting to a mere 0.15% is not noteworthy. But it’s different for Lending Works. Because this is the first time it has suffered at least one bad loan. Prior to now, its 16-month record of nearly 2,000 loans had…
It’s not always easy to spread your money across hundreds of P2P property loans, because the deals are bigger and fewer in number. To counter for that, you have the extra protection of being able to repossess and sell the property if the borrower can’t repay. That…
Until more P2P lending websites have a longer record, searching for patterns to improve loan selection is not possible at most of them. But there’s one way to select loans that I think will work everywhere. Keen investors like to scour through past loans to…
Sometimes I read in the financial pages what some commentators are saying on P2P lending and I’m quite unimpressed. The general message seems to be that if you dip your toe in with a small investment, you’ll learn quickly that it’s safe, and then you can go all…
Buying buy-to-let properties is a very different investment to lending to buy-to-let investors. But both are great investment opportunities in very different ways. Landbay is a P2P lending websites that offers loans to landlords with tenanted residential properties. 4thWay® rates it as one of the safest P2P…
Low-risk RateSetter has overcome considerable regulatory barriers to become the first personal loans P2P lending website to allow its lenders to lend through a pension. Indeed, two pensions. Lending through a pension means you pay no tax on the income you earn. Pensions come with…
The loan acceptance rate can be incredibly useful for lenders like you and me, since it can be a strong indication that a P2P lending opportunity has strict borrower selection standards. If a P2P lending website accepts no more than around 20% of applicants, rejecting…
One of the first measures of risk in a P2P lending company is its historical – or “actual” bad-debt rate. This shows how many pounds of loans have gone bad as a proportion of the money lent. The bad-debt rate is variously called the “loss rate”, the…
This is the story of whacky individual lenders and their high-risk loans. The problem is that this doesn’t seem to be a rare event! I see this happen on numerous P2P lending websites. But I’m going to take FundingKnight as my example today. I only use…
P2P lending company Funding Circle is now offering 20% off Virgin Train travel to people lending their money through its service. Funding Circle is the fifth largest net lender to businesses in the UK and it offers a low risk, market beating opportunity to individual…
Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs has ruled that individuals lending their money through P2P services must pay tax on their lender fees from 6 April 2015. P2P lending website Zopa revealed this in an email to its lenders this evening. Up to this point, lender fees…
I listened to the Money Box interview Neil referred to in P2P Lending is Not Like Picking Shares. (Yes, I’m eight months late too, but I hadn’t even heard of 4thWay® back then.) In that interview, Andy Mullinger of Funding Circle, a business loans P2P lending…
Zopa, one of the safest P2P lending companies and the oldest in the world, has given the vast majority of its lenders higher returns over the past ten years than a large variety of investments, including the stock market and savings accounts, according to its…
Where is the Bank of England taking us? And how does it trick us into letting it do so? The Bank of England does a quarterly poll to see where ordinary people think inflation is going. It’s last survey was in February. Please allow me to tell…
Until recently, FundingSecure has been bragging that no lenders have lost any of their starting money. But it had to happen eventually. Now, a small number of lenders have collectively lost £512 of their starting money. Presumably all those lenders are up overall, because FundingSecure…
This is the second article in 4thWay’s Lending Strategy series that focuses on strategy for a single P2P lending company, and I’ve decided to go with another big one: Funding Circle. As you will see reading the various strategies and techniques below, you can get up…
This guide will be updated regularly with the latest deceptively low risk P2P lending companies – our “hidden gems”. Some P2P lending companies are, in my opinion, hidden gems. These deceptively low-risk P2P lending companies might already have low 4thWay® Risk Ratings, but they also…
