Interest Radar Archives

BlueVestment Releases BluePicks and a New User Interface

After a merger with Interest Radar, BlueVestment continues to serve the retail investor community

July 1, 2015 By Ryan Lichtenwald 3 Comments

Retail investors who are looking for a more hands-on approach to investing in p2p lending have used third party automation tools for portfolio management, analytics and order execution. BlueVestment is among the favorites and today is releasing both a new user interface to their users and their new proprietary scoring model, BluePicks. They also recently merged with Interest Radar, another third party tool that has been in this space since the early days. I spoke to Jon Pildis, Director of Business Development at BlueVestment and Nathan Marcos, Founder of BlueVestment to learn more about these recent developments.

Merger With InterestRadar

Last month, BlueVestment and Interest Radar announced that they were merging. They will operate under the combined entity, BlueVestment, LLC and will continue their focus on Lending Club. Jon acknowledged that Interest Radar had many features that are currently not available in BlueVestment and that to maintain their commitment to their current subscribers, Interest Radar will continue to operate as they take an estimated 3 months to build out the functionality within BlueVestment. Combining the user base and new functionality, along with the development experience of Ricardo Basto (Interest Radar’s founder) will solidify BlueVestment’s place among the top third party tools available. [Read more…]

Overview of P2P Automation and Analytics Sites – Part 2

February 18, 2015 By Ryan Lichtenwald 10 Comments

There is an ever increasing number of websites dedicated to aiding in analytics and investing in Lending Club and Prosper. In part two of this comprehensive two-part series (click here for Part 1) we will look at all of the popular tools that investors use today (there are ten in all) in order to backtest strategies, automate their investments and analyze data. Analytics and data has been a large part of p2p lending from the start and investors are always looking for an advantage to potentially maximize returns. Investment automation allows for a much better investment experience versus selecting notes on the platform by hand.

BlueVestment specializes in automation strictly for LendingClub. Through BlueVestment, users are able to automate investing in notes using credit models from P2P-Picks. P2P-Picks has created their own models based on historic data from Lending Club and Prosper. Investing using either the Profit Maxmizer or Loss Minimizer models is a hands off method of investing in Lending Club. As new data becomes available, the models are updated accordingly to achieve the results of the respective model.

Users can also opt to create their own basic filter criteria using the 22 attributes available to them. In addition, users can create advanced filters using the node builder. This allows for a customized investing experience with different operators as shown below.

Using Note builder to select criteria.

Example of an advanced loan filter.

BlueVestment also has a high level dashboard which includes investment amount, available loan distribution by grade and total loan availability by grade. BlueVestment is a completely free service.

PeerTrader currently offers automation and charting specifically for Prosper with Lending Club integration coming soon. They are currently in open beta and will be free for anyone to use until they officially launch. As of 2015, they are now an SEC Registered Investment Adviser which makes them one of two public retail tools that are an RIA. PeerTrader has just completed their integration with P2P-Picks, which is publicly available when you create a PeerTrader account. [Read more…]

A Guide to Investing on Lending Club with FOLIOfn

January 11, 2013 By Peter Renton 21 Comments

Today we have a guest post from Sarah V., who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is only able to invest in Lending Club through the Folio platform something she has been doing for about eight months. She manages her own investments, does her own taxes with paper and pencil, and has had an interest in investing since she was a kid. She is a regular contributor on the Lend Academy forum.

Much has been written about Lending Club – statistical analysis, strategies, and the like. But some of us are living out in the wilderness, in “trading only” states where you can invest via FOLIOfn but not the Lending Club retail platform. If you’re in one of those states, this blog post is for you! [Editor’s note: the purple states in the map below are the Folio-only states.]

I’ll put it bluntly: the FOLIOfn interface is terrible. It’s slow, and it’s missing an enormous amount of features it really should have. But it’s not impossible to use and sometimes, if you’re savvy enough, you can even use its clunkiness to your advantage.

Buying notes on Folio

There are a few schools of thought on how to use the FOLIOfn platform to buy notes:

Sort by markup/discount, thus finding the best deals.
Sort by yield to maturity to get the best bang for your buck. (Note: this option has recently been removed, but will hopefully come back soon.)
Simulate the retail platform experience by purchasing newly-issued notes, which you can find by clicking both the “Now Current” and “Never Late” notes and sorting by Loan ID number or Note ID number (highest first).
If you have a higher appetite for risk and you’re a very hands-on investor, you can make a lot of money by buying and selling distressed notes, heavily discounted notes, and late or grace-period notes.

The problem comes in when you realize that almost every note on FOLIOfn is there because someone decided they didn’t like it. Usually there is a reason they didn’t want it, and often that reason means you don’t want it either. This results in a lot of lousy notes that you have to look through to find the good ones. Here are a few things to look out for on the “Loan Performance” page: [Read more…]