Portfolio Update July 2022

Hello from Serbia!

Hello from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia! After a summer with a lot of traveling I’m going to start moving around a lot slower from now on so I’m staying here for a few weeks now so I can actually get some more work done. I’m having a great summer and so far spent a full month traveling around Romania, I had a mini holiday in Malta and I also had a wedding and big reunion with friends in Finland. It was really great, but at the same time I’m also happy to finally be able to actually unpack my suitcase for once.

Apart from my investments I’m also sharing more and more content related to my life as a digital nomad, because reaching the ultimate freedom has always been one of my most important reasons to start investing in the first place. So make sure to hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell, so you’ll never have to miss any of my videos.

So now let’s have a look at how my investments have done in July. Last month I had a lot to share because there were so many thing happening, so this time I’ll keep it very short.

Peer-To-Peer Lending

Mintos

On Mintos I received €61,12 in interest and also withdrew €1000 in order to further rebalance my P2P portfolio. I haven’t reinvested this amount yet as I’m currently looking at further diversification beyond the platforms that I’m already invested in, but more on that later.

Mintos also introduced a new feature: a diversification dashboard. At first I wanted to ignore it because I’m not seeing the value of it for my own strategy, but then I realized that the score can actually be misleading and give you a false sense of security. So let’s quickly look at the tool to see what it means and how you should interpret the scores.

Here you see my overall diversification score, which shows 0% at the moment. I don’t know why but let’s ignore this for a moment and look at what Mintos says about how to interpret the scores.

They have created 5 categories with the lowest and worst category for any score below 20%. The it goes up in steps of 10% and from 50% and up the score is rated as ‘Good’ and anything above 65% is considered great. It looks very clear and simple as the higher the score, the better and looking at the colors and wording you want to be at least anywhere above 50%, but ideally above 65%.

Now let’s look back at the graph above where you see the diversification score on the horizontal axis and each blue dot represents the score of a Mintos customer. The distribution looks very awful with a big chunk of clients below 10% and only a small portion of the client base reaches over 50% and barely anyone has a score higher than 65%. So what’s wrong here? Either most of Mintos’ clients take on way too much risk, or there is something wrong with the scoring system. So let’s dive a bit deeper into how the score is being calculated.

Mintos is not giving an exact formula of how the score is being calculated, but the score is made up in some way based on five different component, so let’s go through them to see how you can get a high diversification score.

• Investments: the recommended number of loan investments is at least 100 and this makes total sense. It doesn’t matter how much money you invest, but the more you break it into smaller peaces, the more you diversify your risks so I totally agree with this.
• Lending company distribution: Diversification across more loan originators results in a better score. Mintos advises that any 5 lending companies combined should not make up more than 50% of your portfolio so this means that you should diversify among a bare minimum of at least 10 loan originators. I totally disagree and I think this is where I have the biggest problem with this score. Mintos has a reputation of having a large amount of loan originators but every now and then one of those partners gets in trouble and so do the funds of investors. By diversifying on Mintos you get the good, the bad and the ugly and this means you will might see significant parts of your funds in recovery and incur potential losses over time. I personally prefer to only pick loan originators with a good reputation and track record and that offer a decent enough interest rate, but many of the lending companies don’t fit these criteria. So this means drastically cutting down on the number of loan originators in order to reduce the risks of defaulting loan originators and ending up with more funds in recovery. However, this has a negative effect on the diversification score which is why you should not interpret this score to literally.
• Single company distribution: Mintos advises against investing more than 20% in one loan originator, which makes sense if you want to have a diversified portfolio. But if Mintos is part of your larger P2P portfolio and you only want to invest specifically in a handful loan originators on Mintos that your carefully selected, you could easily end up with more than 20% in one company and this wouldn’t necessarily be bad.
• Country distribution: According to Mintos any 3 countries should not make up more than 50% of your portfolio which makes sense to reduce country and or currency related risks. However, similar as the single company distribution, also here I believe that there’s no problem if you specificaly select certain countries and lending companies to invest on via Mintos as part of your wider P2P portfolio. I don’t know if investing in more countries will actually get your diversification score up, but if it is, it’s very bad in my opinion. Certain countries are very stable and barely pose any country specific risks, while others are high risk due to unstable economies, fluctuating currencies and political theats. We’ve already seen problems occur due to a devaluation of the Turkish lira, the war in Ukraine and economic sanctions against Russia. So in my opinion, some diversification across countries is good, but the wider your country diversification the more risks you’re taking on as well.
• Single country concertration: Mintos advises to have no more than 33% of your funds invested in a single country. To me this makes sense, but I think it’s less applicable to more stable countries, especially countries that are part of the E.U. and Euro-zone (if you’re a European investor like me).

The diversification score only reflects your diversification within the Mintos platform, so when interpreting the scores you should also take any other P2P investments into consideration. On one hand you could have a much wider diversification than is represented by the score if you are also investing via other platforms. But be careful with this conclusion as well, because some loan originators are active on multiple platforms so you could have some overlap without even realizing it. The same applies to country diversification as well.

So all-in-all I think the diversification score has very little value at most, even when zooming into the individual components, but it could be very misleading if not interpreted well and if you don’t include the rest of your P2P portfolio. Nevertheless I like to see innovations like this, but I just wanted to warn about interpreting the scores too literally.

EstateGuru

After a record return on EstateGuru last month, in July only received €49,58.

In July EstateGuru plublished their audited annual report for 2021, which shows an incredible growth so the company is doing very well in terms of expansion. The total amount funded grew with 69% to €203 million compared to 2020 and the revenue grew with 58% to €7.1 million. Off course the rapid growth also comes with higher investments and increased operating expenses, like higher staff costs. The company is not yet profitable and saw their annual loss grow by more then tenfold to €2.2 million. This is of course a lot of money, but to me it looks like they know what they’re doing and they’re taking the right steps. Last year they completed another round of equity investment from which they collected €5.8 million which shows that investors are eager to be on board with EstateGuru.

On July 7th EstateGuru also won the Lendtech of the Year award at the 2022 Europe Fintech Awards in London so congratulation on that!

Peerberry

On PeerBerry I received €74,02 in interest over July, so I’m finally starting to see the results of my increased investments on the platform.

In July PeerBerry also made another €1.4 million repayment of war-affected loans to investors and for me this means that the war-affected loans now make up less than 6% of my loan portfolio on PeerBerry.

Bondora Go&Grow

On Bondora I received €33,47 on my Bondora Go&Grow account.

IUVO Group

From IUVO Group I received €32,60 in interest over July.

In July IUVO Group won two prizes at the Bulgarian b2b Media Awards 2022: one in the category Fintech Company of the Year and for their new product iuvoSAVE in the Innovative Product category. It’s actually funny that they published this is if they won the first prizes, but actually when reading further it became clear that in both categories they got the second prize. But nevertheless it’s a great achievement so congratulations to the team at IUVO Group for this.

Viainvest

On Viainvest I received €15,29 in interest in July.

Robocash

On RoboCash I received €13,89 in interest in July.

Bondster

On Bondster I received €1,27 in interest in July, which is still next to nothing because I’ve only recently started investing on this platform.

Overview Of My P2P Lending Portfolio

In total I received €281,24 in interest from my entire P2P platform. This is probably lower than normal, because of all my reallocations over the last few months.

I’m looking at further diversification across platforms and I will soon start investing on LANDE as well. LANDE (formerly known as LendSecured) is a P2P platform that is specialized in agricultural loans. This is something I haven’t yet invested in, so this would be a new loan type to further diversify my portfolio.

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

During July I received a total of €514,93 in dividend payments from the following stocks and ETFs:

In my previous update about June I discussed my take on the current stock market downturn and explained why it doesn’t matter to me if the market goes up or down and that I don’t care if we have already reached a bottom or not as I continue to follow my strategy to buy small quantities every month. So I’m sticking to that plan to continue to grow my dividend income.

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

Celsius has now officially filed for bankruptcy but at the moment it’s still not clear what will happen to the investor funds. So anything could still happen, from a full return, to accepting a haircut or a full loss, so let’s wait and see how this will evolve.

In the meantime I received a total interest in Bitcoin with the current euro-value of €14,64 from YouHodler and BlockFi.

In the meantime the crypto market has recovered a little bit with Bitcoin even reaching above $23.000 again, but similar to the stock market, I don’t really care about the short term performance and whether we have reached the bottom or not as I’m rather looking at the long term results.

Crypto bonus offers

Under the current market conditions and developments I don’t feel like I should promote crypto lending at all. So I absolutely recommend to make your own dicisions and only invest money you’re prepared to lose and focus on the long term. If you want to sign up for any of the platforms that I’m invested in, you can of course still follow my links to support me and my blog.

My Total Passive Income in July

My total passive income in July was €810,81, almost exactly the same as last month.

But due to the year-on-year growth, the 12-months trailing average continues to rise and is now at €767,48. This means I’m now at 51% of my target of €1500 in monthly passive income.

Final words

Thank you for making it all the way to the end! If you have any questions or remarks, or if you want me to cover any particular topics in the future, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

Until next time!

Video Version Of This Post

Stay up to date with my latest videos by scubscribing to my Youtube channel and if you click on the notification bell, you’ll automatically get a notification when my next video is available.