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Lot of blogs offer their own created merchandise, but I am an engineer and I feel more productive advising you on risks and returns than to design your summer T. That's why I want to suggest you someone else work the I find nice and easy:  StockTwits is the largest social network for investors and traders, with over two million registered community members and millions of monthly visitors. StockTwits was founded in 2008, with a mission to connect regular investors and traders with each other so they can profit, learn, and have fun.  StockTwits is the inventor of the cashtag (e.g.   $AAPL ) and they have a small shop with interesting items. Let me you know in the comment section if you like them as well! And what about all those gains you made with P2P? Compounding is incredible but sometimes we need a pause from our FIRE lifestyle, innit? GOAT and StockX are two sneaker marketplace where you can find new and used authentic kicks. StockX deals also stree

First I started to invest with Portfolio Manager; if I remember correctly I choose a Conservative profile, just to try. First year everything was great, returns were high but being already mindful of the platform default risk, I started to withdraw 100 euro every 200 euro of profits. I wanted to let the compounding do its miracle but at the same time take something back just in case. At the beginning of 2016, the first defaults started to materialise and the reporting package changed, Bondora initiated a long campaign to defend its new method of default loan accounting; I was lured into it, you have to wait the whole life of a loan to properly compare results between repaid and default loans…no? In the meantime, I saw the proportion of F and HR loans grow even if I did not change the portfolio profile: Bondora explained that if the portfolio return was lower than the target return, they were effectively taking in more risk to ‘re-align’ the portfolio. If you are familiar with the

"do applicants ever get rejected?"  Let me introduce you, at minute 1:03, to  Bondora (YES it is an affiliate link, YES I will get $ if you invest and you will get $ BUT I hope you will change your mind by the end of this post). I want to use this post as a cautionary tale about the risks investing in P2P lending and I will start with an analogy with the Great Financial Crisis. The above video is from the movie The Big Short and if you did not watch it, please give yourself a favour and buy the book . In normal times, banks use to take the money you deposit with them and lend to others; those loans stay on the bank balance sheet, meaning if the loan defaults the bank has a loss, therefore the bank has the incentive to give loans to entities it reputes solvable and trustable. More than a decade ago, banks started to 'package' those loans and sell them to external investors: those loans cease to be on the bank balance sheet and the bank get remunerated wi

Viventor does not originate loans itself but is a platform, like the bigger Mintos , open to investors from all over Europe. Partner companies that list loans on Viventor consist of professionals, possessing years of experience in non-bank lending and underwriting, and having their skin completely in the game. Also, access to financing for eligible borrowers is considerably faster than that offered by alternative creditors. It offers different types of loans but Consumer Credit is still the biggest share. One of the advantages offered to investors is different layers of security of investments: Loan originators due diligence and risk management Buyback guarantee (on selected loans) and Payment guarantee (on selected loans) Skin in the game : loan originators are required to keep at least a 5% stake in each loan, aligning their interest and the investor’s one. This is really important, if you are like me a student of the Great Financial Crisis Collateral: in the

I am 41, I started investing and reading about investing when I was 17. That's make 24 years of listening to smart people telling you that leverage is bad and reading about people who went broke because of leverage. In its essence, leverage is not inherently good or bad, it is a magnifier: if what you are doing is good, it makes it better, if what you are doing is bad (and usually you realise it too late), it makes it a disaster. When you invest, especially early in the process, it is important you make mistakes: one thing is to read that something is wrong, one thing is doing it and learn the lesson the hard way, with your own money. You have to learn from your mistakes so that you will not repeat them in the future. You have to learn that no investor is right 100% of the time, see it like the tuition to the investing university. But you have to live to fight another day. So, whatever the mistake, at the end of the day you still have a positive balance to invest the next d

EstateGuru has been operational since November 2014 and is headquartered in Tallin, Estonia. The special feature of EstateGuru is that it started to offer loans to business customers for only short and medium term real estate project: it is a consumer-to-business lending platform. More recently, the platform marketed normal corporate loans backed by a collateral property. Each project comes with a detailed description and pictures, when available, or renderings of the planned real estate development: The minimum amount to participate in a project is EUR 50; if the required loan amount is raised within the subscription period, the loan agreement is concluded. Some loans pays monthly interests, others pay interest plus the principal back at the end of the project. Each loan is secured by a real estate property, usually with a first rank mortgage, the Loan-to-Value cannot exceed 75% and the property value is not determined by EstateGuru but by an accredited real estate apprais

These are the platforms I have money with right now. They may or may not suit you, I have no special knowledge of how they operate, and there may be better options out there that I don't know about. If you're looking for “alternative” investments, I think peer-to-peer lending is a great start: it's very little effort, and you don't need to develop any knowledge before giving it a go. The links in this post may be affiliate links, which pay me a commission when you sign up – often, they pay you a bonus too. I say “may be” because I keep this section updated to reflect who I invest with, not who pays a commission. Nothing in this section constitutes a recommendation to invest with a specific platform, and you must do your own research. Twino FinBee Bondora EstateGuru LinkedFinance VIAInvest DoFinance I also invest in start-ups that operate in P2P, via Seedrs : Orca Abundance Assetz Exchange What I am reading now: Follow me on Twitter  @NProtasoni

There's risk in peer-to-peer as there is in any investment. The important thing is to understand where the risk lies and the actions you can take to keep this risk as low as possible. Loans going bad The most obvious risk is the borrower being unable or unwilling to pay you back. It can happen with any type of loan, but the risk is more pronounced when the loan is unsecured because there's nothing you can seize to get at least some of your money back. By its nature, peer-to-peer suits borrowers who are unable to get funding from banks at lower rates because they're a higher risk – so however much you trust the platform's underwriting, it's rational to assume that some proportions of your loans will go wrong at some point. Platform Collapsing A less visible risk is the actual lending platform getting into trouble. The majority of peer-to-peer platforms in Europe are currently operating at a loss: they have backers who are expecting to absorb these loss

Peer-to-peer lending (or P2P lending) is a brilliantly flexible way of making a higher return on your money than you get in the bank, and a way to diversify your investments from shares and bonds. I strongly recommend you read this entire article before deciding if peer-to-peer is right for you. In subsequent posts, I will share details of the platforms I'm investing with right now; for now though, here's a quick summary to give you an idea of what's possible with peer-to-peer lending. In its simplest form, peer-to-peer is just lending money to another person (or business) without a bank getting involved in the middle. Peer-to-peer lending is often confused with crowdfunding but they are very different investments. It's clear to see why this is attractive. Normally you put your money in the bank, the bank gives you about 0.5% per year if you're lucky, then they lend it out for much more. Without the bank taking a big slice in the middle, you get a higher rate

I started investing with FinBee in 2016: during the years a lot of changes happened (almost all for the worse) but I still suggest you give it a try. The platform is quite small, originating around EUR 1mio of new loans/month but steadily growing. The very positive aspect of the platform is that their underwriting process works really well, in 3 years I had very low number of defaults among my investments. Here a graphic proof of the expected and received instalments: As you can see, the two lines almost overlap. I am only investing in consumer loans with at least B rating and 17% yield or A rating and 14%. C rating loans are still acceptable but the rate of defaults is higher and in my opinion is not compensated by the higher yield. FinBee recently started to originate business loans: I think is good from a diversification point of view but I rarely invested in them because the default history is too short and yields are lower than consumer loans. As you can see from t

I started investing with Twino more than four years ago and as of today, I consider it the best platform I used so far. The account set up is really easy and fast (as I recall), they now have also an app that I never tried. Once your account is ready, I suggest you to set up an Auto-Invest Portfolio: you can choose your investment manually but there is no upside doing so and the auto-invest function works quite well. You can set up portfolios with different characteristics, that invest for example in loans with longer tenors or just in one country, to have control on the risks you are taking. Your capital is your main constrain: you do not want to leave cash un-invested on the platform, therefore choosing more options, but you also want to invest in the highest yielding opportunities, for example setting the lower bound on interest rate higher than 9%. The BuyBack Guarantee is the best feature of the platform: Twino will buy back a loan (principal amount and interest for the inve