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…
We have some rare information about CrowdProperty‘s performance and it looks like it is finally opening up, allowing a wee bit of analysis of some the risks. This is great for me, because I’ve suspected that this is one of the rare P2P lending sites…
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….
Crowd2Fund*, the business loans P2P lending site, has now started to publish its full loan book with detailed information about every loan that has been made through its website. It’s fair to say I now understand Crowd2Fund far better than I did just two weeks…
New loans continue to include a high proportion of very attractive senior loans under 50% LTV. (If you don’t understand what that means for lenders, I’ll explain below.) HNW Lending acts rapidly to recover debts that might turn bad, which dramatically improves bad-debt recovery results….
Many Tesla bond investors are complete lunatics. Today, I read on CNN that Tesla bonds have fallen in price so much that anyone buying its bonds due for repayment in 2025 will now effectively earn 8.6% annual interest. (A falling price for selling your bonds…
4thWay user David Bradshaw had this question for us about Growth Street: “Firstly, I’d just like to compliment you on your excellent website as it’s been a helpful resource for me as I’m sure many others before me, on starting with P2P investments. I now…
Proplend has launched an auto-lend feature for its “tranche A” property loans, whether you lend through its regular account or its IFISA. Proplend’s tranche A loans are for a maximum of 50% of the property’s valuation. Many loans are against properties that are earning income for…
Greg, a 4thWay reader, has asked: “First of all, I must just say how much I’ve appreciated your website as I’ve gone about educating myself in the area of investing over the past few months. “My wife and I have just made our first P2P…
The collapse of a green-energy project that was crowdfunded to the tune of £3.9 million gives valuable lessons to individuals funding new and complicated infrastructure products through peer-to-peer lending sites. Here’s what happened followed by 10 lessons for lenders in future. What was the loan…
