Tue 14 Oct 2008
What Happened To All The Prosper.com Blogs?
Posted by RichSlick under MMO
[13] Comments
There was so much enthusiasm about Prosper.com a few months ago that many PF Bloggers would periodically update their lending stats, profits/losses, experiences and more and those blogs all seem to have gone silent. What gives?
Now is the time to understand how well (or poorly) Prosper acts as an investment vehicle during heavy market down turns. Is Prosper still generating profits for lenders out there or have most gone bust with bad loans?  Is the market for loans good or bad?  What are the typical returns on these loans now?
Someone throw me a bone and give me some info!
If it’s a big bust for everyone then please share that information and don’t let other people go down the rabbit hole with Alice if it’s going to lead to an unsavory adventure.
Based on my prediction, prosper still has about 7 months of life left in it if my assumptions were correct so what’s happening with this company?  I really hope these guys make it because of their novel approach to encouraging entrepreneurship and capitalism but the timing might not have been right.
13 Responses to “ What Happened To All The Prosper.com Blogs? ”
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[…] Quick = Get Rich Slick. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Yesterday I inquired about the absence of Prosper bloggers lately and I received a few responses from Brandon, Mapgirl, […]
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[…] week, Get Rich Slick asked the question, What Happened To All The Prosper.com Blogs? Two years ago, along with RateLadder, I probably wrote about Prosper more than most personal […]
I am also curious. I contacted someone who used to post about it and linked them here to see if they would give some insight.
FWIW, Prosper.com is paying out better than my high yield savings account, but I don’t have much invested there and it has yet to break even now that one loan is seriously delinquent.
I know that one other PF blogger is pulling all their cash out of it when they can.
You can check LendingStats.com if you want more information overall.
I guess I can post something later this week once I check the current numbers.
In my case, I just ran out of time in the day to keep up the blog to the level of quality that I wanted. Stupid new job.
As for lending, I was having problems finding loans that met my risk/reward profile so it turned into a lot of time for very little payback. I ended up finding some other investment strategies that take less time and have a more favorable risk/reward, so I havn’t been lending much.
Brandon contacted me and I’ll be posting something on my website in the next few days. It’s a legitimate question.
However, one thing to note is that many people have said to me lately that their Prosper account has had better returns than their stock market accounts have this year. I don’t know if that’s going to be a long term trend, but if you looked at the stock market through a lens of the same time horizon, you’d probably step back and say that investing in stocks doesn’t work either. Ditto for oil, I believe.
I appreciate the responses. I’m not trying to pass judgment on investment choices, I’m simply trying to understand how well it is or isn’t working right now for the people who joined.
I value an actual prosper investors blogged opinion 1000 times more than any prosper ad or marketing spin churned out by the company.
Lazy, I look forward to reading your update.
It might take me until next week to give a real update. I ended up putting out three posts on p2p lending today with the news that Zopa US is closing, Lending Club is back open, and Prosper is going into a quiet period while it registers for a broker/dealer license with the SEC.
I have been with Prosper over a year now and my observation is that there are not enough quality loans available to invest a large amount of money. fyi I have 35 active loans, 4 payoffs, no late’s or delinquencies, with an ROI of 14.29%.
If your readers are high income/wealth individual’s, I doubt micro lending is for them. They might as well be hard money lenders.
There are plenty of active blogs and active discussion. See for example my blog about prosper.com
http://fred93blog.blogspot.com
Best discussion about prosper.com is found at http://prospers.org
I invest in Prosper.com.
Not sure where the 7 months mentioned above comes into play. Can someone explain why they have 7 months left?
When I first started I made some mistakes and lost a couple a hundred.
When I fine tuned my loan bidding criteria the return was good. About 17%. It is good for middle class income savings. You can’t realy touch it until it matures so it does force someone to save.
The seven months came from an 18 month prediction I made of the typical dot.com startup that went belly up during the dot com boom and bust: average length – 18 months.
Because Prosper is now in a quite period that can extend for some time, it may take a little longer but I still think it may be gone by end of next year.