Mintos Auto Invest

If you are familiar with the P2P marketplace Mintos, you might have heard about the Mintos Auto Invest, a feature that allows investors like you to define and automate your Mintos strategy.

To put it simply, you set up your criteria, and the Mintos Auto Invest does exactly what it says on the tin - automatically invests your funds. The tool invests depending on the settings you establish and the available loans that match your criteria.

Mintos Auto Invest enables you to define the best Mintos strategy.

You can set up multiple criteria - the most important ones being loan term, loan type, and interest rate.

This Mintos Auto Invest Strategy has been updated on 2/11/2020 to reflect Mintos' latest features.

Watch our suggested Mintos Auto Invest Strategy here:

Important Update

Due to the recent suspensions of lending companies on Mintos we have decided to exit our investments. Read more about the latest news in our Mintos review. As of right now, the best Mintos strategy is to pause your investments on Mintos and relocate your funds to some of the more suitable Mintos alternatives that yield higher returns.

Best Mintos Strategy: A Step-By-Step Guide

This tutorial will give you a quick step-by-step guide to show you how to set up your Mintos Auto Invest strategy. We will go through every detail to make you aware of how the tool works and where you should or shouldn’t be putting your money.

Note that you should do your own due diligence about loan originators and countries you want to invest in at any given time. Mintos doesn't do a proper job in monitoring loan originators, which is why many of them got suspended.

How to define your investment strategy
How to use the Mintos Risk score
How to use Mintos’ statistics
How to look up lender’s details
How to avoid investing in overexposed lenders
How to set up your Mintos Auto Invest
What to do if your Mintos Auto Invest isn’t working
Secondary Market strategy
Conclusion

Define Your Mintos Investment Strategy

Before you even begin setting up your Mintos Auto Invest, you need to have an investment strategy in place. You should be able to answer at least the following basic questions. Your answers will help you define the strategy you should use to set up your auto investment.

How long do you want to have your money invested?
How fast do you need to access your investments?
How much return do you expect on your investments?

While we will guide you through all of the settings, please note that every investor will have answered the above questions differently, resulting in a different strategy.

How to Set Up Your Mintos Auto Invest

To set up your Mintos investment strategy, you need to navigate to Invest in the menu and click on + Add strategy.

In the next section, select the “Custom” strategy to proceed to the Auto Invest setup.

We suggest you avoid investing in one of the suggested pre-defined strategies. To find out why to watch this video:

After we have published our video, Mintos has adjusted the "Conservative Strategy" to invest only in lenders with risk scores between 10 and 7.

Mintos doesn’t want you to use any custom strategies, which is why the Mintos Auto Invest is so well hidden. In the next window, you need to choose the automated strategy.

Now, you can finally set up your Mintos Auto Invest strategy.

When defining your strategy, first, you need to choose the currency you want to invest in. On Mintos, you can invest in loans in 12 currencies.

This feature doesn’t bring much value though, as the availability of loans in currencies other than the euro is very limited. So, by default, you will invest in EUR.

Next, you will be asked to invest in either the primary market or the secondary market.

The primary market lists all newly originated loans, while the secondary market lists loans from investors trying to sell their investments.

If it’s your first time investing, you will probably want to invest in the primary market. Below, you will see the first set of criteria to define:

Buyback guarantee
Countries
Loan types
Risk scores
Loan originators

On the right-hand side, you will see a counter. Click on ‘Show matching loans’ to show the number of loans that match your criteria.

You can also click on ‘Show loan distribution’ to see how those loans are distributed across loan originators, countries, and loan types. This is more useful for advanced investors whose priority is diversification.

Now, you must be wondering how to set up your Mintos Auto Invest properly.

There’s plenty of blogs offering “expert advice” on how to use the “best Mintos Auto Invest” strategies. However, most of the people behind those blogs are very poor investors who have already lost some money with P2P lending.

Those strategies will usually result in cash drag as they suggest investing in lenders that have no loans on Mintos. Another common piece of advice you might see is to invest in lenders that don’t pay interest on late loans.

Here at P2P Empire, we value our readers, and our goal is to teach you to fully understand how investing in loans works. Our goal is to give you all the information you need to make informed decisions.

The best way to choose loan originators is to analyze the loan book based on the revamped Mintos risk score system. The P2P marketplace rates individual lenders according to four categories.

In this guide, we will be using the following variables to access the quality of your Auto Invest selection:

Mintos Risk Score
Mintos Statistics
Loan originator details
Exposure of lenders on other marketplaces
Owners of the loan originators

Before we begin, we should mention the investment strategy that is being followed in this guide.

Here are some requirements to look out for:

Investing in the “better” half of Mintos’ lenders
Investing only in companies that pay interest for delayed loans
Investing in loans with a shorter loan period than 12 months

Mintos promotes easy investments that are protected by a buyback guarantee. The marketplace also promotes broad diversification options, which means that you can invest in around 30 countries and over 60 lending companies.

Our rather basic requirements should, therefore, yield very attractive investment opportunities, right?

Let’s see.

Do you appreciate this guide? Invite us for a coffee ☕

Mintos Risk Score

Mintos has replaced the obsolete Mintos loan originator rating with a more transparent rating system, which is now called Mintos Risk Score. This new system evaluates every lender based on four subscores from the following categories:

Loan portfolio performance
Loan servicer efficiency
Buyback strength
Cooperation structure

It’s highly recommended to learn more about this feature before setting up your Mintos Auto Invest. You can read more about it in our in-depth guide about the Mintos Risk Score.

Or watch our review about Mintos Risk Score instead:

Now, let’s have a look at how to use this new Mintos Risk Score to set up your Auto Invest.

How to use the Mintos Risk Score

Let’s say you want to invest in loans from loan originators with a subscore of at least 6 in all categories.

That way, you will be only investing in the better half of Mintos’ loan originators.

In this case, navigate to the Loan Originators page and click on the Mintos Ratings Score tab. Use the filters and choose all subscores above six.

At the moment, only 13 lending companies match this selection.

We suggest creating a table to keep track of your research.

In the next step, you will need to navigate to every loan originator’s page and write down the country in which the company is operating.

For example, the lenders from Mikro Kapital operate in Moldova, Romania, and Belarus.

Repeat this process for all lenders on the list and create a spreadsheet to keep it organized.

How to use Mintos’ Statistics

After you have retrieved the country, navigate to Mintos’ statistics, and look at the lenders’ current loan book and note down the percentage of existing loans.

This gives you a good idea of the performance of the lender’s loans at a given time.

You can use this information to further define your investment criteria.

How to look up lender’s details

An option could be to exclude lenders that have a current portfolio of lower than 70%. This can be a good strategy to apply for lenders who don’t pay interest for delayed payments - a good example here is Mogo in Kazakhstan.

You can look up this information by clicking on the lending company and choosing the radio button Details.

After you have fine-tuned your spreadsheets, it’s time to set up your Auto Invest.

How to avoid investing in overexposed lenders

It’s common that certain lenders are using multiple marketplaces to fund their loans. If that’s the case, a loan originator is likely overleveraged, which can harm your portfolio.

If you are following a more conservative strategy, we suggest avoiding investing in lenders that fund their loans on multiple marketplaces.

Several of the above-mentioned lenders are funding loans on other marketplaces such as IUVO, Viventor, or Bondster.

As you can see for yourself, Mintos rates their “cooperation structure” as very risky.

Mintos Auto Invest Selection

By now, you have learned about the fundamentals that will help you make a better-informed selection.

Here is an example of our research after following the process mentioned above.

As we don’t want to give out money for free, we have excluded lenders that don’t pay interest on delayed payments.

And this is the result.

We narrowed down the selection from 112 lending companies to just 10 loan originators who score at least 6 points in every category and pay out interest on delayed payments.

When choosing the lenders, it’s important to choose only loans by lenders in selected countries. The Mintos risk score on the left of the screen does not represent the average score of every category but the weighted score.

The chosen loan originators operate in Romania, Belarus, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova.

This selection of lenders includes a variety of loan types. By investing in those loans, you will be funding business loans, personal loans, short-term loans, pawnbroker loans, and car loans.

Click on “Show matching loans” on the right side of your screen and have a look at the loan distribution by number.

If you don’t see enough available loans, you might need to adjust your investment term and interest rate.

It’s also good practice to look at “all loans” to get an idea about the interest rate and the investment term that you are accepting.

Let’s say you want to fund loans with a maximum loan term of 12 months. Select your loan period and confirm your selection by clicking on “show loan distribution”.

If you choose to invest in loans shorter than 12 months, you have the following diversification options.

The majority of loans are from Mogo and DelfinGroup in Estonia and Latvia. Mogo is one of the lenders that has an overlapping shareholder with Mintos - Aigars Kesenfelds.

This person also owns suspended lending companies Varks, Dinero, and UkrPozyka, which are part of the Finko Group that owes more than €30M to Mintos investors.

Conclude for yourself whether it’s a good idea to invest on Mintos.

By following a mid-risk approach, you will end up with 13 loan originators.

By excluding lenders who don’t pay interest on delayed payments, you end up with just 10 loan originators.

And if you want to invest in loans with a period shorter than 12 months, you end up with only 4 loan originators from which one is owned by the same person who owns several suspended companies.

Before you confirm your selection, you can also define the interest rate and loan term, which will likely further narrow down the loan distribution.

To avoid investing twice in the same loan, you should not include loans you have already invested in.

It’s also recommended to diversify across loan originators if there are any left after defining the rest of the variables.

What’s wrong with this Auto Invest Strategy?

One aspect of this strategy we didn’t consider is that Mintos’ subscores are weighted according to their “significance”. Mintos, however, does not disclose how the marketplace came up with the percentages.

We have already seen the impact of the “cooperation structure” in the past, so we believe that weighting this category with just 10% is not accurate.

There are currently several companies that refuse to repay investors while continuing to lend money to borrowers.

What if Your Mintos Auto Invest is Not Working?

And, finally, let’s look at what you should do if the Mintos Auto Invest isn’t working. You have a few options to fix it, In most cases, the auto invest tool isn’t working because:

there aren’t enough available loans
you might have paused it accidentally
you have reached the maximum portfolio size

In your Mintos Auto Invest click on ‘show matching loans’ to see whether there are enough available loans that match your criteria. If there aren’t any loans, you will need to adjust your Mintos Auto Invest setting accordingly.

You can do so by:

Adding more loan originators
Adding more countries
Adjusting the rating
Adding more loan types
Making sure you invest in EUR
Lowering the minimum interest rate
Increasing the loan term
Increasing the minimum investment amount

If you have made the changes, your Mintos Auto Invest should be working again. If it isn’t, you can initiate a chat with Mintos’s support and they will help troubleshoot the issue for you.

Another reason why there might not be enough available loans could be because most of the loans had been funded via Mintos’s Invest & Access tool, which sits higher than the auto investment tool in the priority of investments.

What about a Mintos strategy for the secondary market?

Due to the nature of Mintos’ latest developments, we don’t see a point in investing in the secondary market. For most investors, this won’t yield a positive return.

If you decide to trade on the secondary market, you should be aware that the lending company can buy back the loan at any time, which means that if you bought a discounted loan that is rebought by the lender for the initial price, you would take a loss.

Conclusion

Mintos remains the biggest P2P marketplace in Europe. Due to the outrageous amount of funds in recovery - €88 M - we don’t see why someone would want to invest on this platform until those funds are fully recovered.

Mintos has also been pushing a lot of updates that will make your investments “easier” and if that’s the case, be prepared that it’s not always as good as it sounds.

Want to save time and money? Invest on PeerBerry or EstateGuru instead. Those platforms provide stable returns without all the hassle.

ABOUT