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…
UK Bond Network will be the next P2P lending website to be added to the 4thWay® comparison tables this week. UK Bond Network is for high-net worth investors or those classed as “sophisticated” only. If that’s not you then you should probably look away now. The most…
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…
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…
The Bank of England is asking the UK’s biggest banks and building society to perform stress tests again. Like last year, the tests are not as extreme as the events of 2008-10. The argument is that that period was seen as a rare event that only happens…
The founders and directors of LendInvest, Wellesley & Co. and Assetz Capital have over two dozen limited companies between them either as part of their P2P lending operations or as companies very closely related to them. Why? More specifically, is this an extra risk that we lenders…
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…
Generally, individual lenders get their money lent out swiftly. However, it doesn’t always work out that way. One 4thWay® reader wrote this month: “I recently opened an account with LendingWorks, but no money has so far been lent out. I did contact them and they said…
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…
Welcome back to those who read my previous article (Follow Me as I Learn to P2P), and welcome to those who have not. In my previous article, I revealed my desire to save/invest after having my curiosity piqued by reading some 4thWay® articles. I am…
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…
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…
This guide will be updated regularly with the latest low risk, market beating P2P lending companies If you’ve been using the easy P2P lending options: You can earn dramatically more interest while keeping your risks low. You need to be willing to put a bit of extra…
Neil wrote about the inevitability of some (not all) bad-debt provision funds eventually failing in his Candid Opinion blog, When The First Bad-Debt Provision Fund Will Fail. That blog was about under what circumstances a (hypothetical) fund can be expected to fail dramatically. Today, I…
Assetz Capital is a large P2P lending company offering secured business loans, and it has a good record when it comes to bad debts. Now, Assetz Capital is looking for investors to buy shares in itself through Seedrs, a website that enables you to buy shares…
Funding Circle has shown itself to be extremely adept at learning, so that it can improve borrower selection, lower bad debts and increase recoveries when loans go bad. Everything else being equal, this translates into higher returns. It also is likely to mean that bad…
Some P2P lending companies, like many businesses do, have been borrowing money. They might have borrowed as part of their start-up costs and they have certainly been borrowing for expansion. When a P2P lending company borrows money, it takes on risk. If its growth plans fail,…
