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[podcast] Where Blue Elephant’s Brian Weinstein is finding opportunity investing in marketplace lending

blue elephant capital looks for investments

Brian Weinstein of Blue Elephant Capital
Blue Elephant Capital’s Brian Weinstein
What would it take to get a managing director, managing a hundred billion dollars of fixed income assets at BlackRock, to jump ship to a start up asset manager? That’s the question I posed to Brian Weinstein, Chief Investment Officer of Blue Elephant Capital Management. His firm is a quickly growing investor in the peer to peer and direct lending space.

In Brian’s investment universe, the world is starved for yield and addicted to liquidity. When looking for his next investment, Brian and his firm pore through loan portfolios that are accompanied by lots of data to stress test performance assumptions. In his world, banks really ARE good at lending, so he’s looking at spaces where the banks aren’t participating as much in a pursuit for returns.

Brian joins me to discuss how peer to peer investors like him find opportunities by filling in some of the voids left behind by banks. We’ll hear what types of peer and direct lending he’s looking to invest in and what spaces he’s avoiding. We’ll also talk about boat finance. Yes, I said it, boat finance.

Listen to the FULL episode

What you’ll hear on this podcast:

  • Brian’s story of how he got to Blue Elephant: Why Brian left his PM role at BlackRock, managing $100B, to pursue investing in the burgeoning field of marketplace and direct lending
  • The type of research Brian and Blue Elephant conduct to determine the investability in loan portfolios coming out of marketplace and direct lenders
  • What spaces in direct lending Blue Elephant is looking at and which investments it’s staying away from
  • Why Blue Elephant likes the boat finance industry
  • Brian’s view on what banks are really good at and where they aren’t (or don’t participate)
  • Whether institutional investors should take equity positions in the marketplaces they participate in

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Powering the marketplace lending ecosystem — with Matt Burton

orchard powers crowdfunding

This is the next instalment of our series on crowdfunding. You can access my other interviews on crowdfunding here and here.

Matt Burton, cofounder of the Orchard Platform joins me, Zack Miller, on the Tradestreaming Podcast.

Crowdfunding is a huge, transformative trend in investing. Both individual and institutional investors alike are turning to crowdfunding to deploy their monies.

Matt’s company, Orchard, provides the technology infrastructure of many of these new platforms (what Burton calls the “marketplace lending ecosystem”). Given his ringside seat to what’s transpiring in the p2p lending (and broader, in crowdfunding in general) industry, Matt addressed why investors are so interested in this new form of investing, how individual investors and professionals are using these crowdfunding platforms, and more.

Listen to the FULL interview

About Matt

Matt Burton is co-founder and CEO of the Orchard Platform and has spent his entire career helping build, scale, and optimize the internet’s top advertising exchanges (Google, Admeld, LiveRail).

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Photo credit: RTD Photography / Visual Hunt / CC BY-SA