Tracker mortgages when the base rate rises

jamesd

I probably don't have as much startup experience as you, though I did do fairy nicely from employee share options from a fairly young company when it went for the billion dollar or so trade sale rather than IPO exit route some years back. Not a lot of money compared to my current assets but nice at the time.

One of the interesting things about P2P is that there are a wide variety of things to invest in. Some of it is small companies, but that's far from being most of it, particularly in the UK.

In general when it comes to small companies I have a high degree of caution, to the point of declining to lend to startups on P2P loan sites and in the case where the automated tool rules didn't let me do that, selling the loans as soon as I got them. You've seen more of the failure figures than I have, I'm sure, but 70-80% failures is what I expect, maybe more.

When it comes to the P2P platforms themselves, mostly still small companies, the winding up process of the UK players that did it has been pretty good, with both lenders and borrowers treated well. If you want to research this there's a section of the P2P Independent forum dedicated to former P2P companies. The FCA requirements should further improve that, since they require both a funded winding down plan and reasonable amounts of capital.

If someone wants to know which P2P companies are relatively big, there's a list of many of the UK ones and their total and current amounts lent. The top four have in excess of £250 million of lending done each and the next 13 over a million. There's also some information about bad debt history.