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Comment by matt_wulfeck | Hacker News Reader

I stopped investing in lendingclub once I realized the taxes on my gains. Interest is basically counted as income, which makes capital gains in stocks much more attractive.

What I did notice that I was pretty bad at picking notes. Lots of handpicked ones flopped and a lot of random/automatic ones are still going.

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You can invest in Lending Club via a tax deferred account like an IRA. You won't be taxed on gains that way.

Agree that handpicking is a waste of time. Let the autoinvest feature work for you.

You can also use 3rdparty API's like LendingRobot that promise higher returns than LendingClub's own auto-investing feature.

Interesting. Have you used this?

Yeah, I learnt about it from a fellow co-worker and have been using it for the last 6 months. It's pretty seamless to get started with it and has offered better returns for me then the LC's own auto investing strategy.

What's the avg return on autoinvest with lending club?

It really depends on what type of loan grades you tell it you want to invest in but the median returns of LC investors is about 7% and depending on how you setup the auto investor but returns of 5-10% are typical.

You can look at LC investor returns on their website... https://www.lendingclub.com/info/statistics-performance.acti...

How does this work? I thought you can't pull money out? So how are you avoiding the taxes this way?

One way to convert future interest income to capital gain is to buy notes on primary platform and sell notes on secondary platform at a small markup. I am able to turnover about 15% of my Lending Club portfolio this way and generate capital gains in lieu of foregoing future interest income.

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