Background

Chasing good returns, I've been lending on Prosper since summer of 2006. For me, and so many other early Prosper lenders, those returns never materialized and I lost money on my initial investments.

Here it is, some 5 years later, the housing and stock markets have tanked, Prosper has gone through an SEC Registration and LendingClub has emerged. To date my only peer-to-peer lending remains with Prosper, but it's time to explore money a bit more wisely.

In this blog I'll be exploring some ideas I have about lending, re-learning long-forgotten statistics, and ultimately chasing a healthy return for my investment.

My first series will explore an idea that I have that Prosper loans with the word "need" in the title end up with less of a payout than loans without the word need. I've got a statistics book on my desk and a stats professor ready to tell me my assumptions are wrong and 7 years of Prosper loan numbers to analyze.