Prosper Days 2008 is right around the corner (Monday and Tuesday, February 25-26, 2008).  It is being held at The Parc 55 Hotel, 55 Cyril Magin Street, in beautiful San Francisco. To register please visit the website Prosper Days.

The keynote speaker will be Steven Dubner the co-author of Freakonomics the book and the blog.  He is an enthralling author and speaker, exploring such topics as how crime rate reduction is linked to the legalization of abortion and the relationship between cheating on standardized tests and sumo wrestling.

The keynote address will be given by Prosper CEO Chris Larsen.  For over a decade Chris Larsen has focused on using the Internet to make consumer lending more efficient, fair, honest, open, and trustworthy.

There will be plenty of opportunity for networking with other Prosper members in between such entertaining and informational topics as the High ROI Lender Panel, Collections Practices, Leveraging Social Capital, Blogger Panel, Pricing Fundamentals: Earning a Risk Adjusted Return, API Uses and Pitfalls, and Managing Large Portfolios.

Don’t forget to register at the Prosper Days Website.

Here is last year’s keynote by Prosper CEO Chris Larsen.

2 Guest Posts Today From Prosper Members.

Lending on Prosper is Exciting!

by vegetable_lasagna

Sure I could invest money in CD’s, mutual funds, bonds etc. But how boring is that?!?! With Prosper, I feel like I am running my own business - the bank of ME. Except, I don’t have to deal with hiring any employees, answering the phones, or doing much work.

I wake up each morning excited to see if my bids were accepted, or if that borrower who is 2 months late on his/her payment has finally caught up. I like finding money available to lend in my balance statement, so that i can find yet another loan to fund.

The educational value of Prosper is also great. I am learning a lot about my own credit and what it means to me in my life. Since I am studying loan applications all the time and creating my own ranking system, I now know what I must do to make sure I would lend to myself (which I totally would).

If I were you, I would join Prosper in a heartbeat. I tell all my friends and family about it and hopefully they will someday take my advice.

Bid or Not to Bid

by Nokmbk

Bid or not to bid? Biding low just to beat out the another lender on a $50 dollar bid? Sure why not reduce your rate of interest and diminish your average rate of return while increasing your risk. One could say it’s better for the consumer (which is true), but we are all here to prosper. It is funny to see so many lenders out bid each other for 0.01%. Granted the borrowers that write a better ads will attract lenders, but the art is looking beneath the ads. What do people really need the loan for? Are the reasons to borrower founded? Do they have a business plan or a way to stay out of debt??? The people who don’t offer a high enough rate will not be funded; they will learn; and re-list to attracted new lenders with an appetite for the higher risks that their stories with holes present.

So when bidding make sure you bid in small increments because your money is at risk once the loan is funded!!!

Good luck

I’ve always dreamed of being a movie producer. That’s not true, exactly. Always would imply that as a chubby-cheeked infant I was clutching my rattle and thinking about who to cast in the sequel to Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, The River Bottom Nightmare Band Strikes Back. But as I’ve gotten older I realized there were a number of things about my favorite movies I’d do differently. I didn’t care much for Keanu Reeves in the Matrix - I wish the producers’ first choice, Will Smith, had taken the role. I wish Gladiator had lived. I didn’t care too much for the Ewoks - or Jar Jar Binks.

One of the things I’ve been looking for on Prosper and haven’t found yet is someone looking to finance a movie. I know people are out there hoping to do this, though. We’ve all read stories about movies funded on a shoestring - The Blair Witch cost $22,000 to make and earned $248 million, for example. The template for success exists.

When I started lending at Prosper I expected to see loan requests from people consolidating bank debts (and that’s certainly a valid reason to borrow). What I didn’t realize - and this is a fault of my creative thinking perhaps - was that borrowers would also be looking for lenders to invest in businesses or capital projects or even start-ups. I realized that creative projects and (maybe someday) even a film couldn’t be all that far behind.

Even those creative projects like these might be more exciting than routine financial transactions, lenders still need to bring the same critical eye to these requests as they would to anything else. It doesn’t mean that you should be any less critical of the business plans presented by borrowers, but it does mean that someone seeking capital for an unusually creative venture doesn’t automatically have to go hat in hand to a bank.

I’m sure you could argue that I could just invest in a publicly traded entertainment company like Viacom and I’d be investing in movies, too. That’s true - but there’s a certain level of interest that’s sparked thinking you’ll invest in a specific movie. It raises some interesting questions about research. I’m sure that someone who is selling their plasma to make a film can’t be judged solely on their statistics - but how do you find out whether the actors are the types who will appear on Inside the Actor’s Studio, or the types who will be acting in Anaconda IV: Still Slitherin’?

I still have hope that at some point in the future, as a Prosper lender, I’ll be able to turn smugly to the person sitting next to me at the Multiplex and say “I’m an uncredited producer of this film - I financed this guy when nobody believed in him - nobody!” The person sitting next to me will probably move to a different row, because that’s what New Yorkers do when crazy people talk to them in movie theaters, but I’ll know the truth, and I can gloat while I enjoy a Mr. Pibb and some Goobers.

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Steve S. is the author of Brip Blap, a blog about personal finance, health, career management, productivity and self-improvement. He lives and works as a contract governance and audit consultant in the New York City area, and has lived in Germany and Russia. He is an active lender at Prosper.

Prosper Days is right around the corner.  Steven Dubner of Freakonomics is the keynote speaker.  It will be 1.5 days of fun and p2p lending education in beautiful San Francisco, CA.  Join the fun sign up for Prosper Days today: register now.  Bloggers get in for free.

From around the Prosper and Personal Finance blogosphere:

RateLadder wrote about his Prosper Taxes.

The Digerati Life tells of Bad Ways To Use Credit: A List of 21 Credit Card Mistakes

Freakonomics asks Why Aren’t There More Old Criminals?

Lazy Man and money explores Celebrities and Money: Sarah Michelle Gellar

Blogging Away Debt gives a 2 year update on her progress in I Have Been Blogging Away Debt Two Years (congratulations!)

Moorea Malatt at Queer Cents explores Femme Economics: Save Those Shoes!

GenX Finance on Redefining Risk: Your Investments Aren’t as Risky as You Think

Melissa Eastlake at Queer Cents tells us about A Day in Money

brip blap went back in time to visit Cro-Magnon man in an interview with Ur

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RateLadder is a Prosper lender and has been since July, 2006.  He has a passion for p2p lending.  He owns RateLadder — My Prosper.com Journey and other P2P Lending Adventures, P2P No Bank the P2P Blog Aggregate, and ProProsper — Professional Tools for Prosper Lenders featuring SQL access to Prosper data.

Have you ever turned on CNBC and watched it for a bit? If you have, I imagine you had one of two reactions. It’s either “Wow, I can’t believe something could be so boring” or “I can’t believe something could be so fascinating.” There’s no middle ground - at least from the people I have talked to. I’m one of the people that find it fascinating. My wife, well… let’s just say she’s in the other group.

Reporting on companies is a staple of almost all of their programming. If you watch it long enough you get an idea what companies do and how some are performing. It becomes a soap opera or perhaps one the first reality shows on television.

For someone fascinated with the stock market, there’s a danger here. It’s very tempting to think that you know what a company is going to do. And if you think you know what is going to happen, it’s even more tempting to buy or sell stock in an attempt to make a quick profit from it. This is what a stock trader does. Some stock traders do quite well - Timothy Sykes comes to mind. Some of them (perhaps a majority) do not to well; they end up losing most of their money.

Then there are the investors. These people buy stocks for a long time. Often they’ll buy groups of stocks via index funds. The fees to invest in these funds are low and, on average, the returns have been positive over any considerable length of time. This is widely considered a sound way to build wealth. Unfortunately, CNBC doesn’t often devote much of it’s programming time to this way thinking. It’s much more exciting to follow the twists and turns of various companies the steady march upward of index funds over a long time.

I’m finding myself caught in the middle. There’s a large part of me that wants to be a trader. It seduces me into thinking that I’m smarter than the market and can make money this way. Another part of knows better and tells me to continue to invest. It says, “Studies show that you can’t time the market. Other studies show that index funds out-perform individual stocks on average.”

I would only endorse two options for someone caught between trading and investing. The first would be to ignore the trading, shut off CNBC, and get more exercise. The other would be to set up an account with 5% or less of your net worth and start trading. Get it out of your system. If you can turn that into a pile of money, that’s great - take half off the table and start again. If you lose it, then perhaps trading isn’t right for you; stick to a buy and hold philosophy.

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Lazy Man has been a lender at Prosper since February 2006. His lending has been written up in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper. He is the author of the personal finance blog, Lazy Man and Money. He enjoys watching Boston sports while sipping diet cola.