Mintos – Investment Update – First withdrawal payback

Listen to our first audio blog post!

Investment Timeline:

  • May 2018: € 1,000 investment
  • August 2018: € 1,500 investment
  • October 2018: € 200 withdrawal

Audio description:

• 0:00 – 0:59
Hello everyone, this is a first (post) version of the DS fintech in voice. We’re going to talk today about an update of a previous investment and this is regarding the FinTech Mintos. This is a platform we’ve posted (about) before, we’ve been on it since May 2018 and basically the reason to post an update on them is that we have reached what I would call a first withdrawal payback, so basically this is a milestone worth mentioning. This is a platform that we haven’t only invested in, but it was also one of our first investments. We subsequently had a withdrawal, which I’m going to detail following, including investment and withdrawal timeline.

• 0:59 – 1:58
Basically what happened is the following: the total value of our account with Mintos, considering the withdrawal we’ve done hasn’t decreased at all. This means that for the first time while we’ve been investing, we took money out of a FinTech platform and not lose one single Euro from the original investment, which we consider a milestone for DS. It definitely also says good things about the platform, so I also wanted to give you a few more details including timeline and the factors influencing the estimated percentual return obtained, before drawing a few conclusions. In May 2018 we started off with a €1,000 investment in this platform and it took some time to build up a manual portfolio.

• 1:59 – 2:59
Then in August 2018 with put an additional €1,500 so that made a total of €2,500 invested. No other investments, and there was one withdrawal in October of €200. Since Mintos updates your account value regularly, we know that in March we are just surpassing the €2,500 in total account value, which means the €200 can be considered purely income without reducing the amount invested.

• 2:59 – 3:59
The platform informs on the login area that my estimated annual return is 10.34%, but I obviously try to check this by myself to make sure this is correct. In this case, it wasn’t the exact same number, which is not surprising, but none of my calculations indicated Mintos tries to inflate the estimated return, and if anything it showed a lower return than I would.

 
• 3:59 – 4:59
So considering they probably could tweak the numbers to show something more appealing, I have the impression it’s not their focus to show the best numbers possible, which increases my trust in them. As we mentioned, we timed our investments a few months apart from each other, which together with the allocation of the funds affects our returns. To illustrate, if you had €1000 invested over 12 months, you could use the return in Euros divided by ten exactly and automatically as your yearly return.

• 4:59 – 5:56
Our case is not as simple since we had portfolio increase and decrease in different months, as well as the fact that we don’t have a clear 12 month period (started in May and are now in March). In the end, even considering the current 10 months of investment so far, we’re getting more than 10% annualised return over investment, which is confirmed by the platform’s own calculation. Now the other trickier aspect to be considered in the calculations is the compounding effect. In short, every Euro return you make monthly should be included in your invested amount (denominator in return/invested amount) and might explain a slightly lower return that Mintos calculates, given compounding effects.

• 5:57 – 6:55
That could be calculated also within the month using each daily transaction, which is a lot of work if not worked out automatically. We will not do that in the short term, so we’re just considering month by month but do incorporate the monthly compounding factor. It is obviously relevant because if a project with pays you at the beginning of the month, that amount will be reinvested, so your return is over the interest paid previously as well as the original investment. I would obviously be glad to look into compounding interests in more detail in the future, let me know if you’d like that.

 
• 6:57 – 7:54
At this stage, I didn’t want to miss this milestone of Mintos producing a first sort of dividend and at the same time confirmation that their percentage return is not only good but even seems to be better than what they advertise on their website. This is clearly important to be able to trust a platform. Thank you very much for listening. I’m going in the next few days to also include text on this voice post. Please let know what you like and dislike, and if not see you next time for some more fintech. Cheers. Bye.

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