Portfolio Update January 2022

Hello again from sunny Portugal! My last update was a bit delayed but this time I had the time to gather the numbers straight after January was finished so not much time has passed. Nevertheless I’m making some changes in my P2P strategy that I will share below. In my December update I already shared that I stopped investing in new loans in Belarus, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia but now I’m taking additional steps to have more control over where my money is being invested.

My Passive Income in January

My total passive income in January added up to €555,58, a seasonal drop from December, especially on the dividend side. I received €296,91 from P2P lending, €232,69 from dividends, and €25,98 from crypto lending.

Despite the month-on-month drop, compared to January last year my income still increased year-on-year, so the 12-months trailing average also keeps going up and reached €632,69. In relation to my goal of €1500 in monthly income, this means I’m now at 42%.

P2P Lending Portfolio

In January I received €296,91 in interest from my P2P investments. I didn’t make any new deposits, but I withdrew €10 from RoboCash, simply to test the process, so my total P2P portfolio ended the month at a value of €45.363,50.

My New Approach To Using Autoinvest Strategies

When I first started investing in P2P loans over 2 years ago I mainly focussed on selecting the platforms and in the beginning I used whatever information and knowledge I had at the time to create autoinvest strategies. Over time I’ve played around a lot with the settings and as I gained more knowledge and understanding of the P2P landscape I also focussed more of my attention on the selection of loan originators. I’ve also learned a painful lesson when a large amount of my Mintos investments got in trouble at the beginning of the pandemic and despite their efforts to recover funds, I still have over €2000 in recovery.

From now on I will mainly focus on selecting individual loan originators and set up separate autoinvest strategies for each of them. This way I will have more control over how much I invest in each selected loan originator and at what terms. So for example, on the same platform I could use different minimum interest rates and maximum loan duration or a different total amount for each loan originator, based on their offers and my trust in each lending company.

At least, this is my plan for the marketplace platforms as this is less relevant when a group guarantee is in place on for example Viainvest or PeerBerry. It’s not an overnight process as it will require more work and probably some tweeking over time.  I’m still working on it, but I’ll give a quick update on each platform when I go through them one by one.

Mintos

On Mintos I received €134,79 in interest in January.

Mintos was my the first platform in my P2P investment history and over the past 2 years I’ve constantly tried to improve my autoinvest settings. Lately I’ve seen myself being forced to lower the minimum interest rate to 9% to prevent cash drag. Since removing certain countries, as explained in my December Portfolio Update, I still have around 30 loan originators on my autoinvest list. I’m currently doing deeper due dilligence and I’m tightening my criteria, which will reduce the available loans fitting my criteria even further. This will likely lead to cash drag, but my plan is to reallocate some of my funds to other platforms. Since Mintos is my biggest P2P investment and has the most loan originators I’m taking some more time for this, so more on this later.

This week, Mintos also announced a delay in the roll out of notes as part of the regulatory process and they expect this to happen later this year.

EstateGuru

On EstateGuru I received €49,39 in interest in January.

In my last update I already mentioned that I was happy to see that EstateGuru had completely revamped their autoinvest feature. There are now 15 settings you can change and the minimum amount per loan to make full use of all settings has been lowered to 50 euros. I’ve always loved investing manually by going through the details of each new project. This is not only time consuming, but I’ve always had the feeling I was also missing out on some projects that would be filled up already before I was able to see them when logging in once per day. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the new autoinvest options, but since they introduced this I also see a decline in interest rates and rarely see any projects with an interest rate of 10% or higher. I’m not sure if this is a coincidence or if this has to do with more people using the autoinvest and scooping up the higher interest loans, but I decided to give the autoinvest a try to see if I can continue to pick up enough loans by keeping the minimum rate at 10%. Below you can see the settings I’m currently using, but be aware that this is a test and not a proven strategy. One of the most important settings for me is that you can now set a maximum amount per project, so you don’t keep on investing in different stage loans of the same project.

Bondora Go&Grow

In January I received €31,39 in interest on Bondora. Since I only invest in Bondora’s Go&Grow I don’t select any loan originators or have any autoinvest settings to look after.

IUVO Group

On IUVO Group I earned €32,37 in interest in January.

IUVO Group currently has a total of 10 active loan originators, but since one of them is from Russia, I only consider investing in 9 of them at the moment. Some of the lending companies are part of Management Financial Group, the same company behind IUVO Group, but some are not related at all.

Since the IUVO Group autoinvest dashboard doesn’t offer any feature to manage diversification between loan originators, I’ve set up a separate autoinvest strategy for each of the 9 loan originators. I don’t necessarily care about the exact distribution between the loan originators, but rather about the maximum amount I’m willing to expose to each lending company. Therefore I’ve set each autoinvest strategy to a maximum of €1000. I deliberately make sure that the sum (9 x €1000 = €9000) is much higher than my available capital on the platform as I know there might not always be loans available from each loan originator.

Another warning here as well as I’m just putting this approach to the test and I might make changes on the way, so this is also not a proven strategy.

Peerberry

On PeerBerry I received €26,73 in interest in January.

Since I’m very happy with my experience and the developments I’m seeing I’m planning to reallocated some of my Mintos investments to PeerBerry. I won’t be making any changes to the autoinvest settings since the loan originators have group guarantees from Aventus Group and Gofingo.

PeerBerry also just announced that their shareholders will launch a crowdfunding platform called Crowdpear, which will offer investments in real estate and business projects. I will definitely look into that when they share more details about this.

Viainvest

In January I received €15,44  in interest on Viainvest. Since all loan originators belong to the Viasms Group and have a group guarantee, I won’t be making any changes to my autoinvest settings.

Robocash

On RoboCash I received €6,80 in interest in January. I only started investing on RoboCash in November, so I’m still in the test phase in which I withdrew €10 in January to test this process. I wasn’t aware that any withdrawal under €50 wouldn’t be automatically processed so only after my contact with the support team the withdrawal was approved and transferred to my bank account. I don’t understand the point of keeping a withdrawal I’ve requested in my dashboard on a ‘pending status’ until I contact support, but this is also exactly why I’m doing these tests. After my email to support I received a reply on the same day and the money arrived on my bank account the next day.

The autoinvest dashboard of RoboCash doesn’t have an option to balance your investments between loan originators and my test has so far clearly shown the need for this, since almost my entire capital went to only one of the lending companies. Thank god this was not the Kazakhstani one, but by leaving this one out I’m left with three loan originators. In order to get a better balance between them I will set up three separate autoinvest strategies. Strangely enough I can’t do that until there is an actual uninvested cash balance in my account so I’ll have to wait a bit before I can set this up.

P2P bonus offers

Do you want to invest in the P2P platforms that I discussed above? Make sure to check which platforms currently offer a bonus for new signups. You’re not only doing yourself a favor but by using my links you are also supporting my blog so I can continue to create more valuable content.

Stocks & ETFs

In January I received €232,69 in dividends from the following stocks and ETFs:

This is a lot less than in previous months and the list is definitely shorter than in December, but this is purely seasonal. Last year I only received €49,35 in January so compared to that, it’s a big year-on-year jump up.

How I buy my stocks

For most of the stocks in my buy and hold strategy, I use DeGiro as a broker. DeGiro has among the lowest fees and is very user friendly. If you want to start trading via DeGiro you can use this link to sign up so you and I both get €20 off our trading fees.

Crypto Lending

In January I received a total of €25,98 in interest on lending out some of my Bitcoin holdings on three platforms: Celsius, YouHodler and BlockFi. The total income is less than last month, because in December I also received my signup bonuses from Celsius and BlockFi, but the actual interest paid went up because I increased my deposits a bit in January.

In the same period the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies went down dramatically, so technically I’m at a so called ‘impermanent loss’ because the value of my Bitcoin holdings went down much more than the interest I got, at least in euro values. But I don’t worry about this at all, because I received the interest as 0,000759 Bitcoin which means I end up having more Bitcoins. If the value of Bitcoin goes back up, the value of my entire Bitcoin portfolio, including the previously earned interest goes up. Of course this is also the case when Bitcoin drops further in value, but I only see this an an opportunity to slowly add small amount of Bitcoin to my portfolio at a lower price. I don’t intend to sell anything in the short term as I see a lot of potential for cryptocurrencies to grow as an asset class.

Crypto bonus offers

Celsius and BlockFi currently offer a cashback bonus for new signups using my link. Celsius offers a $50 bonus if you deposit $400 or more in crypto and BlockFi offers a $10 bonus for a deposit of only $100 in crypto.

Final words

Thank you for making it all the way to the end of my post. If you have any questions or remarks, or simply want to share your own take on investing, feel free to leave a comment below. I might make another video about my life in Porto, but my next portfolio update will definitely be from another location, as I’m going back to Albania!

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