Monzo Crowd funding

System

danplum5 wrote: »

I'm really surprised at how negative most of you are being.

Monzo are growing at an incredible rate (over 3,000 new customers a day) are completely transparent and are constantly innovating their product based on customer feedback.

Ok, it's a bit of a punt and it's unlikely that you'd see any returns for at least 3 years, but as far as crowd-funding opportunities go this is one of the better ones.

If you do want to invest you better be quick, they're up to £16M out of the £20M.
All those thousands of poor people making a mistake right?

Don't you remember the dot.com bubble? Reading this article in the FT I was not convinced although it is amusing for those not investing. Average deposit of £150 per customer, pretax loss of £33m on revenue of £1.8million and a valuation of $1.5billion!
"Monzo poised to join ranks of Europe’s fintech ‘unicorns’"
https://www.ft.com/content/ef54082c-a16a-11e8-85da-eeb7a9ce36e4

Malthusian

danplum5 wrote: »

but as far as crowd-funding opportunities go this is one of the better ones.

Sadly, I completely agree.

If you do want to invest you better be quick

This always ends well.

All those thousands of poor people making a mistake right?

This always ends really well.

Malthusian

danplum5 wrote:

Some good posts in this thread (although I haven't read all 4,000!) and I thought you might like to hear my approach to wealth accumulation...

My approach (not advised as a sound financial strategy) was to get a loan for £7.5k (at 4.1% APR) and use it follow a trio of what I considered to be the best and most reliable paid subscription horse racing tipsters after researching them through sites that independently verified all of their tips and results.

My secondary strategy was to invest any profit in crowd-funded start up companies (mainly through Crowdcube) so that my profit would be tied up in highly speculative ventures that may pay well in 3-10 years time once the successful ones get acquired or go public.

(link)

Personally I would have stuck with the gee gees. Horse races typically have around 10-20 horses so it's guaranteed that one horse out of ten to twenty will win. This is a much higher success rate than CrowdCube can boast.

danplum5

Economic wrote: »

Don't you remember the dot.com bubble? Reading this article in the FT I was not convinced although it is amusing for those not investing. Average deposit of £150 per customer, pretax loss of £33m on revenue of £1.8million and a valuation of $1.5billion!
"Monzo poised to join ranks of Europe’s fintech ‘unicorns’"

I've heard of that yeah, I think it happened at the end of the last Millennium. It doesn't mean that tech companies aren't worth investing in ever again. I'm sure the venture capital firm that invested £85M performed some due diligence first.

Monzo is only a couple of years old so is completely understandable that it is losing money to start with. You can't just create a bank from scratch and make money from day 1, you have to think long term.

Admittedly I'm a bit biased as got my shares at 51p each during the first funding round and really hope they continue to grow. If the worst should happen and somehow they implode then so be it. It is only a small % of a wider portfolio.

danplum5

Personally I would have stuck with the gee gees. Horse races typically have around 10-20 horses so it's guaranteed that one horse out of ten to twenty will win. This is a much higher success rate than CrowdCube can boast.

I guess we'll see how it pans out with Monzo. And I'm still on the gee gees. Just had a 16/1 winner in the 12.20 so all good thanks!

masonic

danplum5 wrote: »

I've heard of that yeah, I think it happened at the end of the last Millennium. It doesn't mean that tech companies aren't worth investing in ever again. I'm sure the venture capital firm that invested £85M performed some due diligence first.

Monzo is only a couple of years old so is completely understandable that it is losing money to start with. You can't just create a bank from scratch and make money from day 1, you have to think long term.

Admittedly I'm a bit biased as got my shares at 51p each during the first funding round and really hope they continue to grow. If the worst should happen and somehow they implode then so be it. It is only a small % of a wider portfolio.

VC firms who invest in these kind of companies will have an acceptance that most of their investments won't come to anything, but with a large number of investments, they'll stand a chance of capturing the few startups that do.

If you are investing in a large portfolio of such companies, with a small portion of your wealth, and you do your own research, rather than assuming it has been done by others and nothing has changed since, then that's fair enough. However, if this is your first investment, like the OP, then this is amongst the worst things you could do.

danplum5

masonic wrote: »

VC firms who invest in these kind of companies will have an acceptance that most of their investments won't come to anything, but with a large number of investments, they'll stand a chance of capturing the few startups that do.

If you are investing in a large portfolio of such companies, with a small portion of your wealth, and you do your own research, rather than assuming it has been done by others and nothing has changed since, then that's fair enough. However, if this is your first investment, like the OP, then this is amongst the worst things you could do.

Yes that is a fair comment. As a first investment you wouldn't want to put more than 1-2% of your capital into any one asset, especially one as illiquid as a crowd-funded business. I always thought of it as money lost and any return in the future is a nice bonus.

coyrls

danplum5 wrote: »

All those thousands of poor people making a mistake right?

Yes, probably.

Filo25

I can't say too much, I have put a few quid into craft breweries through crowdfunding!

dont_use_vistaprint

Malthusian wrote: »

But Monzo for one hasn't been a huge success. It loses money hand over fist.

If number of users is the yardstick for "success", then give me £50 million of venture capital money and money scammed from clueless noobs on CrowdCrap and I'll give you an app with 10 million users. Here's how it works: you download the app, press a button, and it sends £5 into your bank account. Bam! 10 million users, massive success. We're going to IPO or sell up any day now, spank that overdraft and invest quickly before I increase the made-up share price again.

This might help you understand
https://www.fintech.finance/01-news/what-can-we-learn-from-monzos-success/

Filo25 wrote: »

I can't say too much, I have put a few quid into craft breweries through crowdfunding!

Same... I was one of the first to invest in Punk IPA. Wish I'd invested in Mikkeller