Peer & Social Lending

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Archives for June 2014

Upstart Loans Review - Benefiting Borrowers with Unique Underwriting

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UpstartLogoI recently had the chance to talk to Dave Girouard, who is the former President of Google Enterprise and is now the founder of Upstart - a company that is taking a unique approach to peer to peer lending. Upstart is made up of 15 employees, half of which are from Google.  Traditional and other peer to peer unsecured loans focus on credit score when it comes to determining the probability of loan repayment.  Upstart goes beyond the credit score.  [Read more…]

Lending Club Data Changes Cause 3rd Party Tool Headaches

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Screen Shot 2014-06-20 at 5.31.52 PMThere has been quite the discussion brewing over on the Lend Academy Forum about a recent change from Lending Club. I think it’s important to point out this recent change as they affect some of the third party tools that I feature on the blog. In a nutshell, the change is that instead of tools being able to constantly get up-to-date data from the CSV file right at release time, it is now only updated once every minute.  For those that don’t know what a CSV file is, it is simply a text file which includes organized data - in this case all of the available loans. You can read other forum member’s thoughts here.  What does this mean for third party tools? In the case of P2P-Picks - a lot.

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Penny Notes: A Detailed Look at an Innovative Strategy for Lending Club FOLIOfn Investors

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Note: This is a guest post from New Jersey Guy, who currently only invests through FOLIOfn - the secondary market for Lending Club.  He implements several FOLIOfn strategies, some of which he outlined in his last posts (4 part series) on Peer & Social Lending.  This is a continuation of the post from Lend Academy about his penny note strategy.  Below New Jersey Guy gives a little more detail into this particular strategy.  Please keep in mind that this information is not investment advice,  just the opinion and perspective of one investor.  Thanks to New Jersey Guy for another fantastic guest post!

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Q & A with NoteX360 - Execution Services for the Alternative Lending Market

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NoteX360LogoI reached out to Simon Hermiz who is the co-founder and CEO of NoteX360 to learn more about their offerings.   The easiest way to understand NoteX360 is that they are an aggregator and execution provider for the alternative lending market. Thus, family offices and institutional investors come to them with credit models and filter strategies. NoteX360 executes on behalf of clients using their low latency ordering management system. [Read more…]

Prosper Automated Investing with Nickel Steamroller

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I recently got to a point financially where I was comfortable investing with Prosper.  I wanted to be able to compare the two platforms as well as diversify my peer to peer lending investments across both Lending Club and Prosper. As an added bonus, you get to follow along as I report on my returns and learn how I invest with Prosper.  Since I have no interest in hand selecting loans, it was a no brainer for me to automate with Nickel Steamroller - which is currently free. If you’re interested in automating your investing with Nickel Steamroller, please be sure to contact them and let them know I sent you.  They also offer automation with Lending Club and in my opinion are the number one resource for peer to peer lending analytics. In my next post, I plan to outline more in detail my thoughts on investing with Prosper, but for now here is my latest video on automating my Prosper investing with Nickel Steamroller!

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