Alternative Investment / Lending Platforms

[Kaegi2011]

Hi all,

 

Newbie here so apologies if this has been brought up.  I did a quick search and did not find anything.

 

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone has actual experience investing in these alternative investment / lending platforms that are popping up.  I'm thinking the likes of:

 

www.yieldstreet.com

www.cadre.com

www.crowdstreet.com

 

and I'm sure many others. 

 

These platforms allow direct access to investments such as commercial & resi RE (debt & equity), consumer debt, litigation debt, shipping liquidations, art portfolio, etc.  On the surface I'm wondering where these firms find an edge to source these investments and to price them correctly (alternatively, how were these investments funded previously - hedge funds?).  There is very little data out there on these platforms, so I'd appreciate any insights on your experience. 

[Mark Jr.]

I looked at LendingLoop, setting up an account, getting on a call with the rep.

 

Ended up not moving forward after combing through /r/lendingloop on reddit and thinking there were more defaults in there than initially inferred.

 

One idea I do like is invoice factoring and I’ve dabbled a bit in it factoring receivables for people operating website stores, it’s a business I understand and know the mechanisms for protecting myself. But for awhile there was The Receivables Exchange which I was really interested in but couldn’t access because I was in Canada and couldn’t get a funding mechanism set up.

 

Years later I took another look and they seemed to have changed their model entirely.