Over the past month or so, I’ve talked with a couple of dozen investors who use 4thWay’s research. It’s been one of the advantages of growing a wealthy collective of lenders to get better returns while doing something useful to support the proper functioning of…
We talk to 4thWay users a lot directly, and we get your emails and survey results from you. What we find is that lenders are making the same mistakes over and over again – and frankly it’s worrying us. While the P2P lending sites really…
Lenders who subscribe to 4thWay are asking about P2P borrowers’ ability to pay back their P2P loans, while their home mortgage costs are going up. Rising rates can also potentially knock house prices down, so I’m covering that too. Especially with latest headlines on falling…
“Safe” and “20%” interest is probably not a phrase that you can legitimately hear. But “saf” and “20%” is something else. Because, of all the opportunities where you might be able to earn that return, one of them has to be the safest among them….
In autumn last year, inflation had doubled in six months to 3%, which prompted me to write The Impact Of Inflation On P2P Lending Results. Another six months or so have passed, and the inflation rate has more than doubled again, hitting 7.8%. This means…
This article covers: What is unsecured small business lending? When do small business loan bad debts occur? How and when do these loans make a profit? What do individual lenders need to do to reach a profit? How much does platform ability, borrower quality and…
This is quite a bit of fun for me today. I’m going to look beyond peer-to-peer lending to my old, very well-trodden stomping ground of shares and savings, where I spent nearly 20 years of my life before peer-to-peer lending took over. If you want…
I have always invested in investments that are relatively easy to analyse, so that I have a good chance of being able to weigh up the risk-reward balance properly, and invest with a large margin of safety. The types of investments I choose also need…
HNW Lending offers many loans with exceptionally high-quality security to protect you against losses. This means that the borrower owns properties or possessions that are easy to value and that are worth much more than the loan amount. For a good proportion of these loans,…
ArchOver* is now the latest established P2P lending site to introduce auto-lend combined with auto-diversification. The ArchOver Investment Plan, as it is called, does three very useful things, the third is about the type of diversification on offer, which is a feature that deserves expanding on….
In a recent article, one of his first for 4thWay, freelance investment journalist Cliff D’Arcy suggested the maximum amount that any of us should lend through P2P is 5% or at most 10% of our wealth. Susan, a 4thWay reader, told me on the phone…
Here is the RateSetter lending strategy. RateSetter is one of the simplest and easiest P2P lending offerings available. Lend using the market rate Most of us using RateSetter lend and re-lend our loan repayments automatically using the “market rate”, which is the average rate achieved the previous day. Currently…
When you look deep into the detail of Funding Circle’s* loans, you get some interesting patterns. Today, I compared the two biggest types of loans: “expansion/growth capital” versus “working capital” loans to see how they compare on both bad debts and interest rates. Is one riskier…
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…
Lenders can use the bad-debt rate to see how low bad debts have been in the past on a P2P lending webste. An average annual bad-debt rate of 0.5% during a moderate or good economic backdrop is very low, for example. Any bank would be…
Forecasts might not be the best way to decide whether to lend through a particular P2P lending website, but there are plenty of other ways to do so. UK Bond Network, a P2P lending website, recently sent 4thWay® enough data to get listed in its comparison…
I remember working at stock-market investment website The Motley Fool when Stuart Watson was the editor. He was a smart guy. That’s why, when I told him a friend was re-mortgaging his house to invest in the stock market, he had a very intelligent response,…
Lending Works lending strategy is short and simple, because this P2P lending website is simple and easy to use. You have limited strategy options available, but it still requires a little bit of maintenance. Lending Works Lending Strategy: take it or leave it! Many P2P lending websites…
Back on Wednesday, 30th July 2014, there was an interesting interview on Money Box on BBC Radio 4. But I only just listened to it this morning. At roughly 13 minutes in, the conversation turns to one man’s experiences with peer-to-peer lending. That man is…
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…
