Archives for November 2014

Investing in Lending Club’s IPO

November 18, 2014 by Ryan Lichtenwald 35 Comments

On November 17th, investors received the below email from Lending Club stating that the IPO shares of Lending Club (ticker: LC) are to be offered through Fidelity. Keep in mind it was recently reported that Lending Club may be seeking a buyer. If you are a Lending Club investor as of September 2014, you should have also received the email as well. This was a surprise since myself and many others speculated that the IPO would be offered through Loyal3. I outline the full process in this post and will continue to update this post as I hear more and hopefully successfully invest in the Lending Club IPO. If you’re wanting to get in on the IPO, I would recommend starting this process early. At the bottom of this post, you’ll also find other links to coverage of the LendingClub IPO.

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Quality sites

Top Peer to Peer Lending Complaints

November 14, 2014 by Ryan Lichtenwald 10 Comments

I have been reading a lot of gloomy remarks about peer to peer lending around the web. Some of them are valid concerns and complaints, but most in my opinion simply show a lack of understanding and education. I have a feeling that many people jumped on the bandwagon of investing in peer to peer lending without fully understanding. I sure did, but I also committed to learn more about this new opportunity. My attempt with this blog has always been able to keep me honest about my investments and in turn educate myself (and hopefully maximize my own personal returns along the way). I’ll review a few of these concerns in this post and I welcome any discussion in the comments section. [Read more…]

Introduction to Peer to Peer Lending for Small Business

November 10, 2014 by Ryan Lichtenwald 4 Comments

This is a guest post from Rob Misheloff from SmarterFinanceUSA. Rob specializes in helping small businesses get access to loans - some of which he refers to peer to peer small business loan sites. I invited Rob to do a post since small business lending is something I don’t know much about. As you may know, there are many peer to peer lending companies involved in this space - Dealstruck, Lending Club and OnDeck to name a few. I look forward to learning more about the companies involved in this space, but for now here is a brief introduction and infographic to peer to peer lending for small business.

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Genetic Algorithm Investing With Lending Club via P2PQuant

November 3, 2014 by Ryan Lichtenwald 8 Comments

Filter investing is great, but it also takes time and has some downsides. It used to be that simply filtering out loans that didn’t have 0 inquiries in the last 6 months yielded much higher returns. This still may be true to an extent, but filtering on any one criteria is like chasing a moving target. Lending Club and Prosper have the data just like we do and they do their best to set rates appropriately. There is no doubt that they will continue to do better over time. So what if you could invest based on machine learning which adjusts over time? Enter PeerToPeerQuant. [Read more…]