September 2020: a new platform

It has been a while since I joined a new platform, but I just registered at a new crowdlending platform. Since January there has been a lot of unrest, uncertainty and frustration in the market when it turned out that Envestio and Kuetzal were a scam. And we are still waiting to see which way Grupeer wil go. But I am starting to feel peace is returning to the P2P market.

A crowdfunding directive has been drawn up under the European Capital Markets Union, which has yet to be ratified by the European Parliament. It does contain a number of welcome things that will make investing in crowdlending and crowdfunding more transparent and safer.

All crowdfunding platforms must be licensed by the financial authority of the country of residence, after which their license becomes valid within the entire EU. There will be a legal limit of 5 million euros per project with term of one year or up. Platforms must also offer transparency about returns and parties involved.

Non-sophisticated investors will also have to pass a test, and there will be a maximum investment limit for non-sophisticated investors. Stock exchange platforms already have this in place. A striking requirement is that a cooling down period will apply, during which non-sophisticated investors can decide not to invest and get their money back.

The question remains of course how soon this will be ratified, when it will take effect, and what the final version will look like. The figures for the past month are of course a lot more definitive, so let’s have a look!

Portfolio overview September 2020

Last month my portfolio decreased by € -2,513.26, which is purely caused by the turbulent stock market. My average rate of return over all platforms is 6.6%. The table below shows the details for each category.

Passive income per month

You can find my definition of passive income on my portfolio page.

Activities

To show you how little effort is involved when investing via crowdfunding and crowdlending I have added an overview of the manual actions in the last month:

I did check the platforms every now and then, but this was purely for fun. It wasn’t necessary to get these interest payments and return rates.

Crowdlending

Yesterday I registered with PeerBerry, a platform that I have been hearing good stories about for a long time. A little further on you can find a short introduction to this platform.

 Bondora

A month ago I had withdrawn money from Bondora to get below my 5k limit, and it is now reflected in the daily growth of my portfolio. Bondora pays the interest per day instead of per month, and that is also clear in the overviews on the website:

Bondora gives up to 6.75% interest on your Go & Grow account, which is also my average return over the past two years. This is a bit lower than most other platforms, but as far as I know this is the only one where you have direct access to your money.

I also recently calculated the value growth for each month separately, and then I see that the last 3 months had a value growth of 6.5%. Slightly lower than that 6.75%, but Bondora also promises a maximum of 6.75% and not exactly 6.75%. But I will go over those calculations again before I publish those figures. Of course it could also be a calculation error.

My investments at Bondora returned € 25.56 last month, and my average return rate is now 6.8%.

When you register through this link you’ll receive a 5 euro bonus. Just give their Go & Grow option a try for a few months, and don’t try the other advanced options.

 Brickstarter

Brickstarter has issued a statement for the fact that no new investment opportunities have been published in the last few months. They first want to wait until the market has calmed down and the market has reached the bottom.

They also indicate that the investments in Cádiz are still going quite well, the average income is 95% compared to 2019. Alicante is also still running reasonably well, but there they had to lower the rates and that had an impact. The investments in Malaga and Seville are not going well, which is why they are considering renting out there for longer terms. If they buy new properties again, it will mainly be in Cadiz and Alicante.

In any case, my return is (very) slowly increasing, to 3.1% (last month my average return was 2.9%). Value growth in September was 4.6%, so it is definitely going in the right direction.

My investments at Brickstarter returned € 6.27 last month, and my average return rate is now 3.1%.

 Bulkestate

At Bulkestate I finally received interest again after three months. It was almost double what I expected, but when I went to the site I saw that one of the borrowers has started paying off earlier than expected (9 Blaumaņa Street).

The auto-invest also works fine, this month I received an automatic e-mail twice with the message that an investment had been made in a project. Great, invest without looking back:

My investments at Bulkestate returned € 22.94 last month, and my average return rate is now 3.7%.

 Crowdestate

In August, Crowdestate‘s loan portfolio got its first defaulted project, Metsa tee 33/31/35, however, the long-indebted project MMMSprattus OÜ exited. The debt was processed for a year and a half and the final yield (IRR) of the loans granted to MMMSprattus OÜ turned out to be 3.43% p.a. .

My investments at Crowdestate returned € 65.95 last month, and my average return rate is now 10.5%.

 Crowdestor

At Crowdestor, the free amount has now risen to almost 124 euros, and I expect to receive about the same amount in interest next month. When that is in, I will immediately withdraw it, because Crowdestor is one of the platforms that is above my limit. I recently started using my own limit of 5,000 euros per platform, in order to force more spread.

The question is whether all planned interest will actually come in. An investor has made a public Google Sheets document with an overview of the Crowdestor projects, which anyone can update and extend. This document can be found here . In this document, green, yellow and red indicate whether a project pays on time, is partially paid, or is behind schedule.

A worrisome picture emerges from this. A large part of the projects seems to be behind in payment. I have not yet gone through the list to look up the projects I have invested in and compare this with the data on the Crowdestor site. Of course, the data may not be 100% accurate, as it has been aggregated by several investors themselves. A great initiative, but it shows that this kind of transparency is really essential and should be part of the platform.

My investments at Crowdestor returned € 57.71 last month, and my average return rate is now 16.8%.

 EstateGuru

EstateGuru is now officially registered as a crowdfunding platform in Finland. The website is now also available in Finnish, although it will of course only benefit a small part of European investors. EstateGuru has now financed EUR 240 million in real estate projects in Europe, of which EUR 19 million in Finland. This makes it the largest real estate crowdfunding platform in Europe.

On September 15th, I manually invested in a few projects, then turned on the auto-invest. Since then, it has automatically invested in three projects.

My investments at EstateGuru returned € 22.24 last month, and my average return rate is now 9.9%.

 EvoEstate

This month, no fewer than 13 projects were added to EvoEstate, including 5 ‘skin in the game’ projects. These are projects in which the owners of EvoEstate have invested at least 1,000 euros in their own money.

EvoEstate itself does not finance projects, it is a so-called “aggregator” platform. That means that they publish projects from other crowdfunding platforms and you can invest in them without joining that other platform. So everything runs through EvoEstate, both investing and repayments.

This of course means that there is an extra link between you and the borrower, but it also offers a great opportunity to easily invest in projects on the 19 affiliated platforms, spread over 15 countries. This month I even saw a project in Rotterdam, quite close to home.

My investments at EvoEstate returned € 4.32 last month, and my average return rate is now 2.5%.

 Fast Invest

At Fast Invest the free amount has slowly risen to 15 euros. I hope that will climb to a somewhat higher amount quite quickly, so that I can also bring this platform below my limit. Now it is still about 40 euros above.

My investments at Fast Invest returned € 0.21 last month, and my average return rate is now 12.2%.

 Flender

Last month I got the first message from Flender that a borrower is not paying back (“Padraic Fitzgerald – Farmer”). They are now going to take legal action to get the money back. For me it concerns an amount of 37 euros, which is only a very small part of my portfolio.

At least my stats for Flender still look good:

My investments at Flender returned € 13.67 last month, and my average return rate is now 7.0%.

 Funding Circle NL

Of the 7 projects in which I invested at Funding Circle NL, 2 have now been fully repaid. My average return is a nice average at over 8%. It is a pity that as a private individual you can no longer invest, because it works fine. Most of the current projects will end in 2021 and 2022, but I have 2 projects with an end date in 2023. So this platform can be found in the updates for quite a while, although nothing exciting is happening.

My investments at Funding Circle NL returned € 17.33 last month, and my average return rate is now 8.7%.

 Grupeer

On September 14, Grupeer reported that they have applied for a license from the financial authorities, which should resolve problems with other financial institutions. It is only hoped that they can and really want to make payments. The fact that their bankaccounts have been frozen for quite a while does not give confidence that this will end well for investors.

My investments at Grupeer returned € 0.00 last month, and my average return rate is now 10.6%.

 Iuvo

At Iuvo my returns are declining, because I have received relatively little interest in the past three months. The return over the last three months was also only 2.6%. My average return over the past two years is still above 10 percent.

But a better look paints a picture that looks a lot more worrisome. Most of my portfolio is now well behind with payments. So much so that the buyback guarantee should be activated. The coming month will therefore be crucial, because it will become clear whether the money will indeed be refunded because of the buyback guarantee or whether there are bigger problems. In the latter case, it becomes doubtful whether all the money will be returned, so that is a bit of sweat in the near future.

My investments at Iuvo returned € 5.96 last month, and my average return rate is now 10.6%.

 Lender & Spender

Lender & Spender is a Dutch platform that does not promise high returns, but does give a stable 4% interest. Compared to other countries and platforms, this is of course “very low”, but for the Netherlands it is a fairly high return because the legal maximum interest rates are a lot lower here. Due to the requirements that the platform places on borrowers, the risks are also a lot lower, and your money is also automatically spread over hundreds of loans. And of course 4% is still insanely high when you compare it to a savings account or deposit.

That is why I have decided to deposit money here next month. Of course I have recently withdrawn money from platforms that are above my limit, so it is time to invest some more. And a stable platform so close to home that makes me feel safe is an obvious choice.

My investments at Lender & Spender returned € 8.94 last month, and my average return rate is now 4.5%.

 Mintos

On September 3, I moved 500 euros from EUR account to my RUB account at Mintos. The exchange rates and costs are shown in advance:

Due to the more favorable exchange rate, I now got 25% more Rubles for the same money, which is of course a bonus. On the other hand, the Rubles that I had have fallen in value again, so it doesn’t get you anywhere. Hopefully the price will not continue to fall, because then it was a bad investment. The future will tell.

Originator Kredit24 has been hit hard by the crisis. So much so that they decided to wind down the company. A payment arrangement has been made to repay all investments in the next 10 months. The money in those loans should therefore have been returned in full by mid-May. The first of the 10 payments has already been received by Mintos.

This week I got an email from Mintos with statistics about the spread of my portfolio:

The spread is quite low, so I will take a good look at this in the coming period. This is something to check more often, but an automatic email will help to remind you.

My investments at Mintos returned € -11.01 last month, and my average return rate is now 9.3%.

When you register via this link you’ll receive a 1% cashback bonus over all your investments in the first 90 days.

 NEO Finance

When I started at NEO Finance at the beginning of this year, I paid the costs for the Provision Fund for a large number of loans. You can choose this yourself, in that case you will have a slightly lower return, but the repayment of your loan is guaranteed. The only drawback is that you have to pay the costs immediately. So you go into the negative for a while, but you make up for that after some time.

If a borrower does not want to or cannot repay, and you have not chosen the Provision Fund, NEO Finance will immediately give you the option to sell the loan back to them. For A and A+ loans, this is at 70% of the value, and that percentage drops to 50% for the value for loans with a C rating. After 30 days you can no longer sell the loan and you therefore have to wait and see how much can still be recovered. That can be 100%, or nothing at all.

NEO Finance is also more strictly regulated in this respect, because they are one of the few platforms with an EMI license (European Unlimited E-Money Institution license). You even sign an online contract for selling loans. This all feels a lot safer, you know in advance where you stand and you can choose exactly how many risks you run. Other platforms often have buyback guarantees by the originators, but if an originator is in trouble their buyback guarantee isn’t worth much.

At the moment my returns at NEO Finance are in the red, but I expect that the turning point will be reached in the coming month and the total interest received will be higher than the Provision Fund costs.

My investments at NEO Finance returned € 22.57 last month, and my average return rate is now -0.7%.

When you register via this link you’ll receive a 1% cashback bonus over all your investments in the first 3 months.

 PeerBerry

Yesterday I registered with PeerBerry. This platform was launched in 2017 by the Aventus Group, and is registered in Riga (the office is located in Lithuania).

The platform currently has 26,361 investors, and a total of just over EUR 300 million in loans has been financed. The lenders are active in Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Vietnam. Interest rates go up to 12% and the investors’ average return is 11.55%.

Originally, only loans from the originators within the Aventus group were available, but the platform became independent 2.5 years ago and now also offers loans from other originators.

The vast majority of loans still come from the Aventus group, almost 80%. In addition to the standard buyback guarantee (after 60 days), a “group guarantee” is also provided: the group as a whole guarantees every originator in the group.

Of the more than 50 P2P platforms in Europe, PeerBerry is in 8th place in terms of market share, with between 2.5 and 3% market share. Of the platforms I already invest in, only Mintos, TWINO and Bondora are bigger.

 Reinvest24

Good news for investors at Reinvest24: the costs that are charged for each investment have been halved. You now only pay 1% instead of 2% in purchase costs.

The secondary market has been delayed for a few weeks and is now expected next month. A secondary market makes it easier for investors to sell their investments should they want to withdraw that money or cash in on the profits. It is also easier for new investors to invest (at a discount), even if there are no new projects at that time. Reinvest24 has already shown a preview:

Things are getting better with the number of available projects on Reinvest24. A few months ago regularly had to wait for a new project to arrive, currently there are no fewer than 5 projects open in which you can invest.

My investments at Reinvest24 returned € 5.35 last month, and my average return rate is now 1.2%.

 Robocash

Robocash has introduced a loyalty program, where investors with a higher portfolio will get bonus interest. This is how they try to make it more attractive to larger investors:

Investors with a portfolio of 5,000 euros or more receive 0.3% extra interest on top of the standard 12%, and this bonus interest amounts to 1%. Unfortunately, that’s just above my own limit of 5,000 euros per platform, but I think my limit is more important than that extra bonus interest.

It is a bit strange that investors who already fall into one of these categories have to make an additional deposit before the program is activated. Unless you are already in the highest category (and have invested more than 25,000 euros), so apparently this is an explicit choice of the platform.

My investments at Robocash returned € 0.00 last month, and my average return rate is now 9.4%.

 TFG Crowd

On December 22nd I withdrew some funds again from TFG Crowd, and this was in my own bankaccount the next day.

TFG Crowd also made the auto-invest functionality available this month:

I have activated the auto-invest with the default settings, although I have my reservations about this platform, to see if and how it works. After activation you will see the summary, plus the option to add more. You can use different strategies, for example for the short and long term:

According to the latest update from TFG Crowd, the platform is also doing quite well, since they started in March last year:

But as I said before, I still have reservations about this platform. Yes it is still up, no there are no negative rumours about this platform. Payouts are prompt, the website and functionality is also being updated and extended.

But I keep finding the projects questionable. For example, there is another project from Fivo Capital, a business loan for Cofediction Coffee. More than six months ago I already wrote an article about this, among other things about the fact that there are no websites or other tangible information about it. When I asked about it, a website was registered the same day, but nothing else has been done with it to this day:

As you can see, the website of the company behind the coffee is just a place holder, and that for a company that has been trying to sell coffee for over a year.. I cannot reconcile that with good business.

And then there is also the fact that interest rates of 24-25% are offered. Then they are either loans with extremely high risks, or they try to lure investors with money with such bait … And that could be with malicious intent. For me, the red flags have not disappeared at all. They could be legit, time will tell.

My investments at TFG Crowd returned € 3.98 last month, and my average return rate is now 17.1%.

 TWINO

TWINO is almost back to ‘pre-Corona’ level. The total investor portfolio is only 5% away from the level in February. This is partly due to the fact that more than 1,500 new investors have joined the platform in the last three months, which is probably a record since the platform’s inception.

My investments at TWINO returned € 29.31 last month, and my average return rate is now 9.6%.

 Viainvest

This month, too, there is little to report about Viainvest. No news, no rumors, just a stable income flow and a decent return. Of course, this is exactly how we like to see it as investors.

My investments at Viainvest returned € 20.79 last month, and my average return rate is now 12.0%.

When you register via this link you’ll receive a 10 euro bonus if you invest 50 euro or more.

Crowdfunding

 CrowdAboutNow

In the next month I expect to receive the first reward for my investment in Beer in a Box through CrowdAboutNow. This is the ‘Crowd in a Box beer package’ that every investor receives who has invested 500 euros or more.

The beer subscription starts on October 29, and they will ask in advance which box you want. So in a month’s time the second package could be here as well. What way to get through the coming autumn days!

 Seedrs

At Seedrs there is no news or changes. New startups come by regularly to invest in, and some I would have liked to invest in too. But I have just set a stop for myself here. Not because of the platform or the projects, but because I think I have invested enough through Seedrs for the time being. Too much via one platform is of course not that great for spreading the risk.

Maybe I’ll be looking for another equity crowdfunding platform in the coming months, but I think I’ll stick with it for now. And this form of investment is for the long term, so it is a bit of a wait until the first investment can be cashed. Or one vaporizes of course, because there are quite a few risks involved.

My investments at Seedrs returned € -161.82 last month, and my average return rate is now 6.6%.

When you want to try Seedrs for yourself, you can register via this link and you’ll receive £25 free investment credit after investing £150 or more within 30 days of signing up to Seedrs (around 175 euros).

Stock

The stock market shows again this month how big the fluctuations are. After considerable profits in recent months, there is now another big dip. The overall result since March is still quite positive, and I mostly have long-term stocks and ETFs. So it doesn’t make me nervous, although the much more stable income stream from P2P is much more relaxed. But of course there are other risks involved there.

 BinckBank

My portfolio at BinckBank has fallen considerably this month. Of course it cannot just grow and grow, stock prices always have (significant) ups and downs. And with a growth of 33% since March, there is not much to complain about.

My investments at BinckBank returned € -2,148.53 last month, and my average return rate is now 87.3%.

 DEGIRO

One of the big losers this month at DEGIRO is AirFrance-KLM. In the long run, even though the crisis will take a little longer, I think these types of companies will survive. If only because the governments will want to keep their national airlines. They will be heavily indebted to it, but I am positive that prices will rise again over a longer period of time.

My investments at DEGIRO returned € -476.29 last month, and my average return rate is now 34.9%.

 ING

At ING I invested in two ETFs: gold and the AEX. This is really for the long term, and of course there will always be fluctuations from month to month. This is really an account that I hardly want to worry about. Then these types of ETFs are ideal. And it also has a calming effect, if you can avoid the annoyingly limited app and website.

My investments at ING returned € -48.71 last month, and my average return rate is now 3.5%.

And finally…

That was it for this monthly update. You can subscribe via the contact page and you’ll receive an email the moment a new update is published. Or just visit again next month, that’s up to you.

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Below you can also find the link to my previous posts, where you can find my tips and results of the previous months.