Friday, June 27, 2008

A secondary loan market for Prosper

I've been dabbling in peer-to-peer lending at Prosper for a couple of years now. It's an interesting experiment, but I think it needs a couple of economic cycles to validate the idea; it's been a little worrisome for me seeing the spike in late accounts recently.

One thing that Prosper lacks is a secondary loan market. I cannot transfer the loans owed to me to another party. I like the idea of secondary markets in general; I think they're a natural and healthy thing. More practically, it means that I can't quit Prosper. I can't liquidate my holdings; I have to wait until the term is up. Hopefully they'll eventually add that.

For the time being, one could potentially work around that missing feature by borrowing an equivalent amount through Prosper at a lower rate. That's no guarantee, but there's no guarantee of getting a "fair" value for loans sold on.

Labels: ,

1 Comments:

Blogger Rich said...

I spoke to a guy at prosper a year back, and he said they were shortly going to open it up to secondary markets. Wonder what happened with that?

June 27, 2008 at 11:03 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home