Always searching for interesting investment opportunities, I came across the following loan request on Lending Club. I’m not a member of the page (yet?), but this particular story made my skin crawl. Read these following excerpts from a loan request for $ 8,000:

“This loan will assist in expanding my Forex (Foreign Exchange) company ‘Sovereign Wealth Company’ . Currently I have a total of 30 clients with a goal of 100 by the end of 2010 calendar year. Ninety percent of the capital received from will go towards the purchase of top tier computer hardware which will dramatically increase the speed at which I am able to analyze & execute orders on behalf of my clients.

In addition, I have already hired software engineers from several countries to create what might be some of the most dynamic trading software in the industry today. The remaining capital will go toward maintenance fee’s of the software. Currently my software executes the trades based on the changes in the market trend along with several other proprietary factors. The trading software performs at the highest modeling quality level of 90%. This simple means that for every 10 trades I place in the Forex (Foreign Exchange) market 9 will not only result in a profit, but will reach its intended profit target. <..>

Return On Investment: I plan to successfully fulfill my loan commitment via my company management fee system. The Sovereign Wealth Company Management fees are a hybrid fee system based on traditional hedge funds. In turn for successfully trading each client’s account the Sovereign Wealth Company receives 20% from profit made through each member’s account. To some people who are used to investing in a far less dynamic market place, 20% per month on profits may seem a bit over the top, but when you factor in that the Sovereign Wealth Company could produce account increases of 10% to 40% per month it’s all relative when compare to yearly fee’s charged by money managers in other industries.”

The sad thing is, this loan is already 31 % funded! Almost every other sentence should have made several red flags pop up for any reasonable human being, but apparently there are still enough people out there for whom common sense is not so common.