Happy New Year to you and your family! I hope the festive season was enjoyable for you (as much as it could be with the current COVID situation anyway).
The December monthly update was missed again, mainly because I’ve been trying to figure out a way to shorten the time it takes to publish updates, but still keep information current on everything. Also trying to shorten the time it takes me to write the updates (currently at least a full day & a half, and sometimes two), so it’s not such a big job every month.
With this in mind, I’ve decided to change the format of the updates. From now on, all Peer to Peer Platform individual updates (along with current account screenshots etc.) will be kept on the main review page of that platform. You can always get to the current update by going to the individual review page and scrolling down to the “Latest Update and Current State of Account” section. Or, by entering the review page URL in your browser and adding #Latest to the end (so like https://obviousinvestor.com/kuflink-review/#Latest) & it will take you right there.
This way I can update the reviews & make changes to the account data as they happen without having to write a novel at the end of each month all at once, and that should hopefully make them quicker (and information more accurate as I’ll update it when it happens instead of at the end of each month).
With that, we’ll move on to the individual portfolio updates.
Disclaimers
The information below is comprised of my opinions on current investment market conditions and my personal actions with my investments. It should not in any way be construed as financial advice. Please do your own research before making investment decisions and do not base them solely on what you read on this website. Please read my full disclaimer of more information.
Some of the links on this website are affiliate referral links. For cashback offers, you’ll generally need to use these links to qualify for the cashback. If you use these links I can sometimes receive a commission, at absolutely no cost to you. This helps me to run the website, write new platform reviews, publish monthly portfolio updates & generally keep me interested in taking the time to share the information you are currently reading. I don’t receive commissions from all links, and it has no effect on my ongoing opinions on investments, which are entirely focused on generating Income and preserving capital.
Peer to Peer Lending Portfolio Update
Total Peer to Peer lending investment decreased a little over the last couple of months. Most of this capital went over to the Whisky Portfolio, and I also pulled some out for some new deals that are coming in 2022 from Asset Exchange.
While I’m on the subject of Assetz Exchange, if you read my site regularly you’ll know that property valuations with this platform can go up and down because of the way their loan exchange works. Unfortunately this makes overall income from the Peer to Peer Lending Portfolio too volatile to track accurately. I look at Peer to Peer Lending as more of a fixed income asset class rather than a growth asset class. So I decided to go back and only include invested capital and income from properties in the calculations (and not the actual value of the properties). When I sell the investments, it can be included as part of the income at that time. Hopefully that should solve the issue with property valuations making it difficult to see what the actual income was for a particular month.
With the above change it brought overall P2P Lending Portfolio XIRR down to 4.99% which is unimpressive as an investment asset class. However I believe the platforms I’m invested in are relatively safe, so I’m willing to take the risk for this return rather than having the cash sat in a bank with inflation eating away at it. My strategy moving forward is to try and increase that number by moving some funds to higher paying investments without compromising safety by a large amount. All lending figures are available on the Tracking sheet in the Peer to Peer Lending Portfolio.
Over the last couple of months I moved capital from Loanpad to CrowdProperty, Kuflink and Assetz Exchange in an effort to try and bring the overall XIRR up for the portfolio. We’ll see how that works out long term but they all pay upwards of 5.5% so it should help.
Kuflink is showing an XIRR of 5.87% currently, however that will change significantly over the next few months as many of the deals which will be paying back were set to compound interest rather than pay monthly. Plus my ISA will pay at the beginning of April so that will increase things a bit too. As Kuflink is currently my biggest lending account by value, that should raise my overall portfolio XIRR by a good bit as well.
Cash drag from Unbolted seems to be getting better, so I moved some more capital back there to see if I can get that lent out. So far it hasn’t but we’ll give it a few weeks & see how it goes.
Investors received an email from Lending Works saying they are winding down their retail lending side & will be lending only from “alternate sources” which I’m guessing means banks or investment funds (Intriva is said to be one of them). If you see the main review page, you’ll note that I copied the actual email there. There have been many P2P platforms which have gone the “institutional investor only” way since the pandemic hit in 2020. Real shame as keeping an overall XIRR up around 7%-8% with good diversification used to be easy. Not so much nowadays unfortunately.
Apart from that, November & December were quiet months in Peer to Peer lending, with everything else just about normal.
Latest Individual Peer to Peer Platform Updates
(Click link to go to latest update in review)
You can always see the live Peer to Peer Lending Portfolio data here >>
Securities, Bonds, Gold & Crypto Portfolios
USD Growth Portfolio
First a bit of house keeping: If you follow my growth portfolios you may have noticed that I have changed the way returns are calculated. When I was rebalancing my actual brokerage accounts I noticed a discrepancy in the calculations & also that I had been missing some dividend payments & automatically rebalancing at a different time. So I updated everything & started to calculate the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) which is the way most brokerages seem to display returns these days. Now you can see the raw actual returns (% increase since initial investment divided by time invested), plus the CAGR on each portfolio page. Dividend payments & reinvestment have all been updated accurately.
On with the show: My main USD Growth Portfolio rallied into the end of the year finishing up 11.11% higher for 2021. The overall annual CAGR for this portfolio is 9.92% since 2005. Can’t complain about that. I completed the annual rebalance on the last day of the year which will show up in the figures when I update at the end of January 2022.
Watching these portfolios can be boring most of the time, but boring is generally good with long term investments.
Permanent Portfolios (all currencies)
Both the USD and EURO based portfolios made new highs by the end of the year showing 4.14% and 8.56% returns for the year respectively. The GBP based portfolio pulled back just a bit in December due to the GLTL GILTS ETF taking a hit, but still showed a gain of 5.52% for the year and a CAGR of 7.57% since 2012. Again these portfolios tend to be very boring but reliable. The Permeant Portfolio assets they are based on have performed this way for the last 100 years or more, so I would be surprised if anything changes in my lifetime. You can see a 50+ year asset class backtest of these assets on the Portfolio Visualizer site by clicking here.
A couple of good books to read on these portfolios are “Fail-Safe Investing” and “The Permanent Portfolio” if you’re interested in how they’re constructed. Both oldies but goodies.
Crypto Currency Portfolio
I use Kraken & Binance for my Crypto Portfolio (buying/selling/staking). And I use the Ledger Nano X & S for Crypto offline cold storage.
Visit Kraken Visit BinanceThe Crypto portfolio had pulled back from its high of $103k at the end of October 2021 down to $77k by the end of the year. So volatile are these assets, but they make for interesting opportunities.
My first crypto investment (PolkaDOT) has been up over 50% then back down to almost even. DOT started its Parachain Auctions on November 11th, so we’ll see what that does for the price over the next few months.
In November I bought some Chiliz Tokens. My reason being that I think there is a good possibility they could do well. The token is all about letting sports fans get involved with their teams & voting on team/club decisions, which I think could be big long term considering how generally nuts sports fans can be about their teams (including me). I also picked up some Shiba Inu which is a total punt. This is another absolutely useless meme coin like DOGE, but if someone famous got behind it (like Elon Musk did with DOGE) things could get interesting. I have over 23 million of these useless coins now (for a total purchase cost of $1,000). If by some remote chance they were to go to a high of .74 as DOGE did, well, do the math. Total punt as I said earlier but worth a shot I’d say.
Apart from that, rewards keep coming in from Crypto Staking, so I’m just watching to see what happens. If we can get a bigger pullback, which I think could be possible, I will likely buy more crypto including Bitcoin. I have held off buying Bitcoin so far as I was looking more for the huge win coins with a little bit of gambling capital. If Bitcoin pulls back enough now though, I will likely put a more substantial amount of capital into it. I think it has enough credibility now with funds dumping billions into it, plus small countries adopting it as a currency, that it would be very difficult to get rid of now. So providing I can buy at a good price, it should be a relatively safe long term investment against inflation & fiat currency collapse.
Whisky Portfolio
I buy & store my whisky through WhiskyInvestDirect.com
Visit WebsiteI picked up several different whisky’s over the last couple of months, all from pre-ordered new batches. I am still in the process of building my whisky portfolio. This will be a steady process as I am only going to buy new, pre-order liquids from WhiskyInvestDirect.com from now on as I am in this for the long run and I think this is the best way to make a steady profit without too much work (Lazy Investor, remember?). That being said, I think there is a little more profit possible from buying specific whisky’s from the order board if you have the time to do the research on which ones historically have made more gain, sounds like too much work for me though so I’ll just diversify into everything that comes up new on the pre-order and plan to hold it for 5-10 years which should return between 7% & 9% per annum historically. I can always sell it on the order board if something changes and I need to retrieve my capital.
The portfolio has already started to show a bit of a profit. It would be more were it not for the 1.75% commissions on each purchase. That is just a one time thing though (until I sell of course) so as the portfolio grows & more product is added, the gains should accelerate.
Summary
That’s it for this shorter update. Hopefully I got over the relevant information in this new format without waffling too much? Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to comment on the post, or email me directly if you prefer.
Good luck with your investments in the coming months! Remember, it’s about patience & persistence, not perfection! If you start investing in various assets when you are young, just a small amount every month like I did, you’ll be amazed how quickly it becomes a significant portfolio. You’ll also be amazed at how quickly you get old 😀
My best to you and your families. Stay safe and I’ll post an investment update again soon.
€ – Euro Permanent Portfolio
Maturing Whisky Portfolio
$ – US Dollar Growth Portfolio
£ – GBP Permanent Portfolio
£ – GBP Peer to Peer Lending Portfolio
$ – Recovery Portfolio
Short term stock portfolio for The Obvious Investor website. UPDATE: May 31st, 2021: The Recovery…
$ – US Dollar Permanent Portfolio
Below are the results of my personal USD Permanent Portfolio of mixed assets in US…
฿ – Cryptocurrency Portfolio
Disclaimers:
This page is presented for informational purposes only. I am not a Financial Adviser and therefore not qualified to give financial advice. Please do your own research and make your own investment decisions. Do not make investment decisions based solely on the information presented on this website.
* My opinions, reviews, star ratings and risk ratings are based on my personal investing experience with the company being reviewed. These ratings are personal opinions and are subjective.
** Some of the links on this website are affiliate referral links. When you click on these links, I can sometimes receive a commission, at absolutely no cost to you. This helps me to continue to offer new reviews & monthly portfolio updates here on my website. I don’t receive commissions from all platforms and it has no effect on my ongoing opinions on investments & investment platforms. Income from my investments and capital preservation are my main motivations.
Platforms reviewed on this website I am currently investing with, or I have invested with in the past. You can see with full transparency on my Portfolio Returns page which assets & platforms I am invested with (or have previously been invested with) at any point in time. I am not paid a fee by any of the companies to write reviews, so the reviews are unbiased and purely based on my own personal experiences.
Please read my full website Disclaimer before making investment decisions.
Hi Mark,
Great blog as usual, and hope you too had a happy xmas/ New Year period.
I like your new site format; it’s very neat to be able to click straight to the latest updates from the P2P Panel.
Like yourself, I’m still very happy with CP and KL, easily my two biggest investments. And I’ve also noticed the lag-phase for UB investments has improved.
Fortunately, I’m almost fully out of AC; there have been far too many defaults from the small/ medium businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector. Very sad for those concerned.
Regarding EM, my only concern is the lack of diversification. I note that your £20k in EM is spread over 14 loans, averaging at over £1,400 per loan. To me that sounds rather a lot, especially as there’s not a huge amount of info on each loan. Anyway, I’m just holding £1k in EM at the mo.
One day soon I will look carefully at your whisky recommendation (and use your link), but I’ll have to persuade her indoors first. She totally gets property and P2P, but not investing in whisky!
Thanks again, and all the best for 2022. Richard of Sussex
Hi Richard,
Thanks for the kind words, it means a lot that you took the time to comment.
I too looked at the low diversification when I was first assessing EasyMoney. I came to the conclusions though that: 1. they have never had a default in their history (even through COVID their loans have mostly paid on time), and 2. the loans are very well vetted with reasonable LTV’s. I took a look at all of the loans they put me in to and nothing worries me. I could sell out if so. So overall I’m very comfortable and happy with the investment for now, even with that level of diversification. Even with Loanpad the diversification is lower, but again their loans are so well vetted with excellent security, I don’t worry about it.
On the Whisky investment; I hear ya about “her indoors”. I tell my lady that I own £13k of whisky, plus I’m look at putting a lot more into it over the next year or so. She’s fine as long as it’s kept in a different location to where I’m at. If I were to tell her I’m storing it in the garage, that would be a no-go for sure, because she knows me 🙂
Happy New Year to you, Mark.
Glad to see the January review — I think I’m addicted to your excellent posts! I’m one of those creatures of habit, so help me, and therefore did really enjoy the ‘old format’ but totally appreciate why you’ve changed the format of your updates. I’m still a fan!
I am still thinking Crypto over (mostly because “him indoors” isn’t too keen)… ironically, I had an opportunity to invest in Bitcoin when it first became available (a long time ago). Feel like a fool now. And I probably will feel like a fool again in a few years’ time if I don’t step off the safety bridge and leap into the Crypto sea. Who knows. But I shall continue to enjoy news of your success with it.
Keep up the good work, and all the best for a successful and healthy 20222.