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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#671

Post by Shrugs »

gabemart wrote: post #470
Shrugs wrote: post #325

I made http://fivestar.io/ a year or two ago; it's a better Amazon search. It shines when you search for something that you want the best version of, without caring about the details; i.e., let the masses determine the quality for you. It weights results based on ratings, review volume, and some other stuff, segmenting the results by price range. Helps me answer the question "I want the best phone mount for my bike,…

What volume of traffic / searches do you get?

1000 uniques/month on average, not including when I post the site on hacker news. The clickthrough/conversion rate is pretty solid. 35% of users buy something after clicking through to Amazon, which makes sense cause it's a pretty strong signal of intent.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#672

Post by [deleted] »

huac wrote: post #568
Rainymood wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The market cannot be beat. I really would like to believe this, but please explain to me how then how firms like Renaissance can exist ... Not sure whether it's relevant but I'll add that I'm an economics PhD student.

Rentech, in particular, data mines weak signals out of gigabytes of historical data, and has a team of PhD mathematicians working to find these signals. Each strategy has some small positive expected value, so in aggregate they can be profitable. Two reasons you can't replicate this - 'you' aren't a team of super top notch mathematicians with decades of data, and even if you had an exact copy of their trading strateg…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#673

Post by sean_patel »

tomcam wrote: post #610
sean_patel wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In early 2016 I purchased commercial real estate, got a 25 year fixed rate mortgage, and leased it. What was your downpayment? Asking because I tried to do the same thing earlier this year. Thought I was clever, did the math on how much I can rent out an apt on AirBnB, and what the mortgage would be on 30 year fixed, and my calcs said I need to put only 5% down to break-even. Then I contact lender and turns out, fo…

No. Because the lender knows your AirBnB investments could easily be regulated out of existence. I suggest you live super frugally and save up cash for your real estate purchases. (We did this and so have many of our friend.)

Thanks tomcam (cool username btw :)

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#674

Post by thewhitetulip »

tomcam wrote: post #659
thewhitetulip wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Yes, I do understand that folly regarding money. Money tends to bend reality, there are many psychological experiments done with money, for instance: spending physical money induces more pain than spending money using a card, that's why it is recommended to carry cash around the next time we do shopping (read this in a book Thinking Fast and Slow and observed in real life) I know you aren't trying to remov…

LOVE the Vue.js book. Thanks for pointing me to it. It's a timely contribution for my work. For a non-writer, you're a damn good writer. Thanks for all your contributions.

Thank you for your compliment :-) If you like it, please help me in spreading word about it!

By the way, I had started writing a novel 2yrs ago, but I am not finding time to complete it!

I didn't understand what you meant by "It'ts a timely contribution for my work".

The book is far from complete though, and the 5'th chapter was written in two hours :-D. I have observed that (when I take a vacation of a week to program), I am more effective when I have 2hr programming sessions.

I'll contact you when the book is done :-)

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#675

Post by buf »

wallace_f wrote: post #599
buf wrote: post #14

https://www.castingcall.club Social network for amateur voice actors. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@buf/accidentally-built-a-successful-soci... Brings in about $2k/mo. p2p lending is hit or miss for me: 3-10% Index funds pull in the rest. I've also moved temporarily to a very cheap COL country so that I can focus on some more side projects to pull in extra sources of income before I return to the work fo…

Can you tell me more about moving to a cheaper COl country, pros and cons, and which countries look most appealing to you?

I chose Sofia, Bulgaria. I pay about $500/mo for all my expenses. It's true that I could find that in the US as well, but I'd be hard-pressed to find something that isn't deeply rural.

In Sofia, I'm in the capital. There's lifestyle necessities like grocery stores, fast internet, etc. Plus I won't need a car because of the excellent metro. If I want to catch an American movie or a show, there are malls/theatres. It really has just about everything I need.

It also helps that my wife is Bulgarian.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#676

Post by qwrusz »

jamez1 wrote: post #670
qwrusz wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illuminati confirmed then right. My bad. Professional investors are not pretty consistently beating the market... secular ! Anyone can have a good year or two. I'm not talking about dudes talking their book on CNBC. Yes there are shops that beat the market, but if you have beaten the market 5 years in a row, you can't keep it a secret even if you want to.

How exactly do you think the performance is made public, if the fund doesn't want it to be? This isn't about illuminati, this is just logic. You can't hide what you're doing from the institutions you have to deal with, but they won't exactly disclose it to general public. Why would you promote your fund, if you have all the FUM you need? If you are doing well, why would you tell people about it? It is funny that your…

You say you work in the industry. How long have you been doing this and what do you do?

You don't have to answer but your questions are odd for someone with experience in the industry. But let's get into it:

How is performance made public? The same way people know what "stealth" startups are doing. Sometimes a document leaks and sometimes people talk. Usually both. Let's just say a manager is super secretive. Do you know how many people in the chain know performance anyway... Current and former employees. Current and former recruiters of these employees. Current and former clients. Current and former consultants to those clients. etc... And you're saying all these people also don't have that human urge to brag about these rock stars of the investment world? OK.

Even if that were the case, everyone has a cousin at State Street or HSBC, these people take coffee breaks and love to gossip performance and secrets breakdown there.

This is like Fermi's paradox. If all these funds out there are beating the market, then where the hell are they??

All of the funds beating the market are secretive and successfully secretive? For decades?

If it was as common as you imply there should be more of them known to the public by choice or by accident. That is logic.

Don't be the guy who mortgages his house to buy Herbalife products and tells his wife this is your year.

The comment above said 99.9% are not beating the market. There are thousands of funds out there. All funds are filing Form ADV's now...We know who exists. So yes there's a few people who do beat the market. Those 3 Russian guys in Texas and that story about the MIT PhD's working out of a house outside Miami and so yes, there's a few examples out there. Dinky family offices don't count. But no, there's a not a bunch of professional investors with serious weight under management and outside clients beating the market over a secular horizon.

There's a handful, and if you are at one of them congrats to you. But to come on a forum saying there's a bunch of professional investors beating the market, they just all happen to super secretive billionaires and they don't tell anyone about it. That's misleading. That's tech back office got your info from a e-book kinda talk. And it would be at odds with your original thesis that folks that beat the market are secretive and don't talk. So it makes me think you don't work at one, you just want to believe they exist. But again if you do work at one, congrats. Are you hiring? DM me.

So where are they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#677

Post by Havoc »

dejv wrote: post #626
Havoc wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty impressive. I was under the impression that its near break-even. Which site are you using if I may ask? And what is your idea of short time in this context?

I am from Czech Republic and I am using quite a new platform called Zonky. What I see is that quality of loans go down as a platform scale and I am lucky to be with this platform from the start. So my cohort is made up of mostly early adopters. I am year in my portfolio with 0 defaulted loans and 1 late payment (I feel like this loan will default during the lifetime). My strategy is to invest to nonconsumer debt (no…

Thanks

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#678

Post by useandthrow94 »

jrheard wrote: post #13

Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so…

Has anyone invested on a peer-to-peer lending platform? Curious of how the risk & reward for such platforms compare to those of ETFs and index funds.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#679

Post by irrational »

hobonumber1 wrote: post #475
irrational wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but I always sell my ESPP as soon as it is purchased. That is an immediate 15+% return. Our ESPP is 15% off of the lower of either the beginning or the ending of the offering. Of course the hope is that it will be the lower at the beginning of the offering so that the sell will be 15% + the amount the stock has risen since the beginning.

Well it is 15% but you are paying income tax on it because you aren't holding it for a year. So depending on your tax situation, it may be closer to 7-10%. Still good though.

Well, according to this guy: https://thefinancebuff.com/employee-stock-purchase-plan-espp... it is closer to a 90% return. The example he gives is exactly how my company's ESPP works.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#680

Post by joemanaco »

cableshaft wrote: post #653
joemanaco wrote: post #180

I'm making between $3'000 and $10'000 Dollars with native apps/games and html5 games. I made much much more a few years ago but app store revenue is decreasing each month and all my latest apps made me nearly nothing. (My portfolio: http://intermediaware.com ).

I used to make native apps/games and some web games, and I was wanting to start making small games again, but I keep hearing how revenue has dropped precipitously for them and it makes me worried. As someone who's experiencing the drop in revenue firsthand, what are you thinking of doing to address that? Shift platforms to PC/Steam? Change the designs of future games to reflect current trends, etc.? I was considering…

I think you should have a good concept/idea how to reach your audience without to rely on the app stores.

When I started that wasn't required. You just released your game and users are coming in for free. So I decided to do lots of small apps - but in the long run it would have been wiser to do apps that engage the users for a long time and constantly update with new content to keep those users engaged.

For myself I'm currently moving to bigger projects and also release for consoles and PC/Steam. But it's very risky for a small developer - because if you develop serveral months or years and the game flops you're basically out of business.

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