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Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

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Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Correct my if I'm wrong... You are very wrong , plus you are talking to jerguismi (localbitcoin's founder), who I'd presume has made quite a bit from arbitrage in the space...

The article does make a very interesting point. One which I'm hoping jerguismi could respond to. The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage. Basically, you couldn't buy in one market and sell in another market simultaneously. Wouldn't that make an arbitrage opportunity speculative? Also, because jerguismi is a founder of a bitcoin exchange, isn't it in his interest to promote tradi…

> The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage.

The article is wrong on many levels. You don't need to transact (or even own) bitcoins in order to arbitrage. You can just buy/sell and open short/long positions via the exchanges websockets API... Not WallSt speed, but a decent speed for any self-made bot vs point&click traders.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#112
post #17

* Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. * Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment, but stable income and you reduce your own energy bills. See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar * Renting out property. Needs a much larger initial inves…

"Stoozing" (hadn't heard it called that before) hasn't been profitable in a long time, unless you're willing to take huge risks (in which case, there are better ways to make leveraged bets). I haven't seen a balance transfer offer with a transaction fee of less than 2% in quite a while. Even at 1%, you'd just break even.

Even if you are willing to take on a moderate amount of risk, most people - even those with good credit and decent incomes - are going to net a few hundred bucks per year off this thing, max.

It is a really poor way to make extra income.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all your eBooks are bringing in $60 / month in total? For the incredible time investment required to write books, that is quite discouragingly low .

This is less than I spend on coffee in a month.

That's a lot! :)

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any low-fees index fund.

Vanguard had very low fee reit index funds. If you want to generate income it is a good option (as opposed to stock index funds) because reits are required to pay 90% of their income as dividends. You can look at all the historical dividend data on the website

They tend to be very volatile though. The VIG (Vanguard Dividend ETF) pays 2.4%. Dollar-cost average in on bad market days.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#115
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Also UK focused - Matched Betting. Exploiting Bookmakers signup/recurring offers for a guaranteed profit. This is good for an early surge of ~£2k followed by a pretty easily achievable £200-£500 per month for <5 hours commitment per week.

Any guides or links to get started on this kind of thing?

Either he means exploiting bonus programs for new members, which is hardly sustainable and unless there's an endless supply of those. Or it's your regular arbitrage gaming, which is also hardly worth the effort and not free of risk. If it's an arbitrage scheme in an exchange, where the quotes might vary over time, your are gambling and at that you are probably playing the bookie who always has the better latency.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#116

Amazon recently launched a new app store that pays developers by the minute in lieu of all other monetization techniques, it's great if you can come up with engaging apps. https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground

I love the symmetry with AWS. I pay them for one minute of compute, they pay me for one minute of eyeballs.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#117
post #9
post #4

Save money and invest it.

Can you give examples of what kind of low-touch reasonable-return investments you've benefited from?

I use betterment for automated investing. It's pretty straightforward, they provide a tech wrapper around vanguard index funds. I agree with their portfolio allocation, so it works great for me.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does make a very interesting point. One which I'm hoping jerguismi could respond to. The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage. Basically, you couldn't buy in one market and sell in another market simultaneously. Wouldn't that make an arbitrage opportunity speculative? Also, because jerguismi is a founder of a bitcoin exchange, isn't it in his interest to promote tradi…

> The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage. The article is wrong on many levels. You don't need to transact (or even own) bitcoins in order to arbitrage. You can just buy/sell and open short/long positions via the exchanges websockets API... Not WallSt speed, but a decent speed for any self-made bot vs point&click traders.

Can you elaborate a bit more? What do you mean by "You can just buy/sell and open short/long positions"?

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#119
post #98

Paint pictures of people's dogs. Yep, a little bit of painting is involved, but painting is fun, right? There is an inexhaustible supply of middle class people wanting pictures of their dogs painted and they are prepared to pay proper art prices for competent or in-style renditions of their dog in some picturesque scene. Since we are not dogs* and are people, poor painting is not so obvious and efforts get well recei…

While I like painting and I like dogs, this is quite literally the opposite of "passive income".

I have a friend who gets by on painting pictures of dogs, he also starts imbibing alcohol by mid afternoon, which is after an 11 a.m. start. He is not famous, even within the small town where he lives and paints. He also spends longer just being friends with the clients rather than doing a lot of painting, which is invariably more 'painting by numbers' as people have photos they want 'interpreted'.

Really, this can be 'passive income'...!

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#120
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it's great if you can come up with engaging apps" ...and the Amazon app marketplace has a miraculous recovery and somehow because a legitimate revenue source. It probably speaks volumes how badly their device sales are on how likely that is.

It's not an App Store where someone could get a billion downloads, probably not even a million except maybe dragged out over a year. But I netted $8k last month on Underground against 38k downloads, that's pretty decent.

Pretty decent indeed! How many apps made up that 38k?
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