Recently there has been a lot of talk around the peer to peer lending community about institutional investors. Peer to peer institutional investors are companies who invest in places such as Lending Club and Prosper on behalf of their clients. We reached out to one named Looking Glass Investments (LGI) which is headquartered in Milwaukee, WI. We had the opportunity to talk with co-founders Matthew O’Malley and Dr.Chad Cotti about their experience in the industry.
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Archives for November 2013
Brian’s Portfolio (10/2013)
At the end of October my portfolio had 79 notes in it. My average rate jumped climbed to 19.03% due to taking on even more high interest notes.
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GroundFloor Announces Pilot Project Details
GroundFloor announced the details behind their pilot 100% crowd funded real estate investment project today. They’ve chosen to base it in the city of Atlanta so that they can take “…advantage of Georgia’s innovative securities laws and the Invest Georgia Exemption.” Their goal is still to make real estate investing available to all regardless of net worth and income. Essentially they are trying to do to real estate what Lending Club and Prosper have done with traditional loans. This is a company that we’ve been watching for some time now and it’s exciting to see them finally release their first project.
The pilot project will open on November 20th, 2013 with minimum investments at the $100 level. Their goal is to raise $300,000 to fund two loans. These loans will be used to refinance, renovate, and lease a Midtown residential development. Sadly, you must be located in Georgia to invest in this project which makes it inaccessible all but the 3% of the US who live there.
If you’re interested in more information about GroundFloor or want to invest in their pilot project (must be located in Georgia) please check out their website. If you’re interested in their most recent press release (11/11/2013) you can find that online as well.
Lending Club adds Adjusted Net Annualized Return
Some of you may have already heard about or seen a change to your Lending Club account. Last week they added an on/off switch for adjusted net annualized return. Often times, I am met with skepticism when I tell people about my investment in Lending Club and it is soon followed by a question of my return on investment. I feel that I can now give them a fairly accurate number without having to do any math. [Read more…]
Free Lending Club Guide
We’ve been busy here at Peer & Social Lending and have created a basic guide to investing with Lending Club that you can get for free! Simply subscribe to receive updates on the right side of our homepage and we will send you the free guide once you confirm your email. We have taken much of the information we learned as new investors in Lending Club in hopes to help others who are considering adding peer to peer lending to their investment portfolio. The guide will serve as a starting point for those new to investing in Lending Club and we hope you find it valuable. Feel free to contact us with any feedback.
-Brian & Ryan
Peer and Social Lending website introduction
We were previously known as Lending Club Statistics. There were several reasons that prompted this change, but ultimately we decided that since we were interested in more peer & social lending companies that our domain name should reflect that. An example of this is when we featured a Q & A from a new peer to peer real estate company groundfloor. We will be continuing to focus on popular companies like Lending Club and Prosper
, but will not be limiting ourselves to those topics.
Positive Returns with LendingClub
Awhile back, LendingClub had a part of their site that stated something to the effect that no investor with 800+ notes had negative returns. They have since removed this and I had not seen any statistics that stated something similar until yesterday when I was browsing the site.
1 As of May 24, 2013, over 99% of investors with 100 of more Notes and with no single Note accounting for more than 2.5% of their total investment, have positive returns. To meet this criteria you would need to invest a minimum of $2,500 and none of the Notes could be greater than 2.5% of your total investment. The foregoing is not directed to the specific investment objectives, financial situation or investment needs of any particular person and should not be considered investment advice. You should consider reviewing the prospectus with a financial advisor prior to investing. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
This is a far stretch from the diversification they use to advertise and is certainly comforting for people with smaller accounts (like us). So the message today? Stick with investing $25 per note for smaller accounts and you *should* see a positive return. Invest in higher grade notes that are recently listed and you should see higher positive returns.