Freelancer Cliff expresses his own unique views, ensuring you get different opinions to the more typical 4thWay experts and 4thWay researchers’ views. Read about Cliff. As someone with an interest in peer-to-peer lending, you’ve probably heard of Warren Buffett, the American billionaire who is widely…
My main research focus over the past few weeks has been on re-interviewing Growth Street, probing for more details, and pushing it for better quality data. This article covers all that, with my usually candid opinions thrown in. Check out my three-minute summary and, if…
There’s a lot for lenders to learn about the Growth Street ISA, launched in 2019. Take a dive into all the important aspects right here, and find out how it compares to the Growth Street’s ordinary lending account. The Growth Street ISA is covered by…
Cliff is an experienced freelance investment journalist, who is 4thWay’s guest “P2P Cynic” and P2P investment fund writer. Read about Cliff. Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending website Funding Circle is one of the UK’s leading lenders to small businesses. Founded in August 2010, the business remained a…
Landbay has just announced that a “major financial institution” will lend another £1 billion through it. Landbay has previously arranged over £300 million in loans, with most of that coming from regular lenders. I asked Landbay* some of the key questions that our experts at…
Cliff is an experienced freelance investment journalist, who is 4thWay’s guest “P2P Cynic” and P2P investment fund writer. Read about Cliff. Five years ago, acclaimed fund manager Neil Woodford was sitting on top of the world. After 26 years of unparalleled success at Invesco Perpetual,…
Property peer-to-peer lending sites that use loan brokers or regional managers to attract borrowers always require an extra little bit of attention from 4thWay. Brokers don’t just do the initial assessment of a loan. They are also partly salespeople, selling the loans to banks and…
HNW Lending PLUS Rating update HNW Lending now has 3/3 PLUSes – the highest and top 4thWay PLUS Rating – on both its senior loans and junior loans. Previously, its junior loans had a 2/3 PLUS Rating. For junior loans, its 4thWay Risk Score ticked…
This is just a brief note on the two recent P2P lending site closures. Lendy has closed after lenders suffered a high amount of late and bad debt, as well as very expensive legal problems, among other things. (I wrote about some of its issues…
In May, the most interesting and well-written comment about peer-to-peer lending or IFISAs that is posted on 4thWay’s discussion boards, or the most interesting emailed contribution we receive, will win £100 if we choose to publish it. We may even pay out for more than…
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…
4thWay’s experts are now part-way through their latest reassessment of the P2P lending sites’ (and P2P IFISA providers’) 4thWay PLUS Ratings. As usual, they took the opportunity to make measurable improvements to our ratings methodology. All the improvements make the 4thWay team feel better, because…
A property IFISA is a tax-free investment account where you can lend to borrowers who have real property – real estate – to back up those loans. This piece is based on a vast amount of research over many years. I could have easily made…
I’m going to explain some of the strengths and limitations of reserve funds. Then I’m going to write about three simple steps you can take to give yourself the level of safety you probably want and have expected all along, to get yourself prepared for…
2018 was another record year for peer-to-peer lending, with several big players passing major milestones last year. Big numbers and positive returns During 2018, Zopa passed the £4 billion mark for cumulative lending since launching in 2005, while cumulative loans at RateSetter passed £3 billion…
One of the P2P lending sites that I think is not used enough by lenders is Lending Works*, which does personal loans to creditworthy borrowers – mostly prime borrowers. Why are lenders ignoring Lending Works? I think Lending Works just doesn’t appear, at first site,…
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…
Cliff is an experienced freelance investment journalist hired in as 4thWay’s “Chief P2P Cynic” to give you the alternative view on lending. He is also a specialist in buying shares, so he analyses opportunities to buy shares in P2P lending sites or P2P investment funds….
Recently, one borrower at ArchOver* suffered severe trouble. This borrower is so large that I shall argue it represents something like 8% of ArchOver’s entire historical (corrected) loan book. That is too much. What happened with this borrower? Every borrower and every bad debt has…
From our point of view, it was never a good start for Lendy, formerly called Saving Stream. Since the beginning, it never passed the basic, simple tests cited in principles one and three of 4thWay’s 10 P2P Investing Principles. In short, Lendy hasn’t provided enough…
