Making money with passive income

I haven't written in a while, and I haven't managed any of my passive income stuff for just as long. When the market started going sour, I lost motivation to put effort into my projects. If there's one thing I've learned from this period, is that passive income requires work. It might not be continuous work, but you need to put in quite a bit of effort in it to reap the rewards.

I recently reevaluated all my passive income projects. My portfolio income is pretty much crap now. ING Direct has cut interest a lot, but so has every other bank. Propser was in a quiet period while they register with the SEC to offer a secondary market for loans to be bought, sold, and traded. They came out recently, but now they have to register with the individual states. Most states are already done, but as luck would have it, my state is not done yet. So I still have my 6 loans (I had 7, but the one with the A credit defaulted...go figure). They're active, and my return looks pretty good considering my Sharebuilder stinks right now. I just hope Prosper will allow me to reinvest my funds into more loans.

As for Sharebuilder, most of my dividends were cut. Then I made some poor choices. You should know the stories behind Sirius, Freddie Mac, and Fairpoint Communications. I bought knowing they would go up, then I didn't sell when they did go up. And now I'm holding. I vowed that if I did that again, I would sell. Not so! I bought American Apparel a while back. It nearly doubled with an 80% gain after a few weeks of holding. Did I sell? No. I thought they would continue to go up. Then the market had a dip. Consumer spending went lower. Confidence went down. Now I'm holding. To make matters worse, I went to an American Apparel store and didn't like their stuff. I want to sell now, but I want to at least recover my commissions. Oy.

As for my passive income ventures. Adsense for my blogs is doing nothing for me. I'm not as active with my blogs as other successful bloggers are. I'm not as aggressive either with pushing the marketing for my blogs. Then there is Hubpages. I wrote one hub a while back and left it at that. But after reading some stuff about being more active, I wrote four more hubs this past week. I saw my traffic jump a bit, and may have even made $0.10 (I forgot to add the hubs to my Adsense tracker so not sure if that's where they came from). Anyway, seeing some activity has motivated me, so I aim to have 25 - 50 hubs by the end of the year. Epinions still pays occasionally depending on page views on my reviews. I haven't been able to write any new ones; mainly because I haven't bought much stuff lately. And I notice the biggest paying reviews are on electronics and gear. Not a lot of people look up reviews for knives, which I wrote 3 or 4 reviews on. So I'll write more when I get more stuff.

I really need to devote some time every week to improving my passive income situation. Unless you have a really superior blog and/or product, you really need to put in some work to get the benefit. And even then, the earnings eventually taper off and you have to work a bit again. It's almost cyclical.

Well, I'm still brainstorming a lot of ideas, so I hope to be in a better place in ther near future.

Sirius gets a lifeline!

Liberty Media, owner of DirecTV, has agreed to loan Sirius some money in return for some shares. This should keep Sirius afloat for a bit. We'll see how it goes. Check out the articles at MarketWatch and Washington Post!

Well well well...what are you doing Sirius??

Well, I logged on last night to see find out that Sirius is looking at bankruptcy. So the shares I've been holding has dropped 31% so far. How much did I lose because of this report? $3? Haha. See the thing is I bought these shares pretty cheap. Then I lost 70-80% of the value when news that Sirius will have to work very hard to make 2009's debt obligations. Normally, if you don't think the stock will recover, you sell and take the loss. But I didn't own that much, so the proceeds from the sale would've amounted to nearly nothing. I held on to the shares just in case they do manage their debt well and the stock would recover. Cost of holding was nothing to me as I already lost most of the initial investment.

So now, with my 100 shares at around $7 total, I'm just gonna let it sit and watch it go to zero. That or wait for Charlie Ergen, head of Dish Network, to offer to buy out Sirius again (he made an offer earlier but was rebuffed). So what was the lesson we learned from this experience? Don't just buy a stock because it's cheap and you think it might have potential. Do some research, because there's a reason it's so cheap. But I must say that for a while, it looked like Sirius might pull through with the cross-platform receiver they were receiving and the life-subscription offer before the rate increase. If Ergen hadn't bought some of the debt Sirius owed, making it harder for them to refinance, they might have pulled through.

REVIEW: Really really LOUD!

Bionaire BFH3520 Heater

Product rating: * (out of 5)

Pros: Sleek, thermostat, LED temperature display, 16 hour limit for timer

Cons: VERY VERY LOUD

The Bottom Line:
Since the fan is so loud, I would only recommend this for use in industrial areas. And only if you really need the temperature readout.

Background

I just moved to a new apartment where my main heater is in the kitchen. To keep me warm at night I had small space heater someone gave me, but it had no thermostat or timer, so I usually wind up pretty hot when I wake up. I was out at dinner one night, when I noticed the restaurant was using a Lasko Tower Heater (#5115). After that I knew I wanted to get one. I went out to a hardware store and picked one up, but as I was about to pay, I saw the Bionaire Tower Heater. For some reason, I thought the Bionaire was a better brand so I purchased that instead.

Appearance/Design

The Bionaire Tower Heater looks very sleek with smooth lines and a "pedestal" extension. It came unassembled, but it was very easy to add the extension on the bottom and then put on the base. At the top of the heater, there is a space to put the remote when it's not in use. Pretty thoughtful. The front has a metal covering. The only difference between my model and this one I'm reviewing was that the casing was black.

Operation

The heater was fairly simple to use. I plugged it in and it beeped to acknowledge power. LED display showed the current temp. Pressing the power button would cycle it through HI, LO, AH (Auto-high), AL (Auto-low), and OFF. With HI and LO, you can't set the temperature, but with AH and AL you can. There's also a button to toggle the oscillate mode. Pressing the temperature buttons will bring up the timer where you can tell it to shut off is X amount of hours, or turn on (when pressing while it's off) after X amount of hours up to 16. Pretty cool feature.

Unfortunately, as feature-laden as the heater was, the fan was very loud in operation. I laid in bed wide-eyed wondering to myself how anyone could even use this heater. There was no option to adjust the fan at all! It sounded even louder than my air conditioner fan! After trying to convince myself that it's not really that loud and to try to treat it as white noise, I shut it off and used my old small heater. I returned it the next day for the Lasko.

Conclusion

Great design, lots of features, but execution doomed this product. People won't use this if the fan sounds almost like a kitchen hood vent. I'm very surprised no one at Bionaire thought otherwise and stopped the product from going out.

Recommended: No

See my other reviews at Epinions.com

Reviewing at Epinions

I've been buying quite a few items lately, so I finally have a chance to contribute a bit more at Epinions with my reviews. I'm going to start posting them here as well to see if search engines might pick it up.

Aflac expected to report 20% rise in Q4 earnings

Caught a little blurb on MarketWatch.com:

"Meanwhile, Aflac (AFL), which provides supplemental health and life insurance products, is expected to report a 20% rise in earnings to $1.01 a share in the fourth quarter, according to analysts surveyed by FactSet Research. Its shares gave up 1.1% to $22.97 during the regular session."

With the market down today, this is pretty good news. I expect AFL to jump a bit in after-market trading and tomorrow when their announcement hits the rest of the news outlets. Meanwhile, Sandisk is going to report a loss, while Macy's just announced layoffs and a dividend cut. Boy, this economy stinks.

Amazon beats estimates

So Reuters and the New York Times both have articles for Amazon (AMZN). Amazon posted some nice Q1 numbers late in the day today. Net income is up 9%. AMZN closed at $50.00, and according to the articles, it's already up 11% in after-market trading. Pretty impressive. I'm going to say it'll go up some more as the results hits the rest of the news circuits. This is pretty exciting as the market was actually down today. So Western Digital (WDC) yesterday, and AMZN today. Not all's dark and gloomy.

(Note: I do not own any shares of AMZN. I do own some shares of WDC.)

Missed this headline somehow...

Western Digital (WDC) announced their fiscal Q2 results yesterday. I have no idea why I didn't get the headline yesterday, but it really doesn't matter as I do own WDC. But again, my theory of a bit of a delay in mob market response holds up again. If I had saw the first couple headlines yesterday, I could've called this one a bit better. The headlines have hit the mainstream today, which is reflected in the market price. Again, I don't know why Google reader didn't pick this up. But then again, I was pretty busy at work.

In any case, WDC announced their results with EPS of $0.06/share (net income of 14M). That's adjusted for restructuring charges, so pre-adjustment, EPS was $0.55/share (net income of $123M). Just a quick peek at the market, WDC is up $1.50 (10.42%). Pretty nice. My only lament was that I didn't buy a larger lot; I only have 13 shares. I had purchased WDC with my proceeds of when Budweiser merged with In-Bev. Ever since then, I've told myself to try to aim for trades of 50 shares or more.

Anyway, WDC is my strongest performing holding, and I am slightly kicking myself for not having at least bought 50 shares. But I am also very glad for not selling WDC to get Seagate to try and get another dividend-paying stock. They're having some problems with one of their products. WDC, on the other hand, just announced their 2TB Caviar drive. And I still like their Passport external drives very much. Very sleek. It's even in the Apple store, and anything blessed by the sacred fruit can't be that bad right?

Pfizer to buy Wyeth

Pfizer announced today that they are buying Wyeth for $68B. This values Wyeth shares at $50.19/ea (the deal will involve Pfizer paying $33 and 0.985 Pfizer shares for every Wyeth share). Normally with an acquisition announcement, shares of the company being acquired trades to pretty close to the acquisition price. This deal is a bit more complex, so Wyeth shares will trade to an amount relative to the Pfizer stock amount. It's 9:54AM, and WYE is at $44.75 (up $1.01). PFE is at $16.27. So if you buy WYE now, you will get $33 per share, plus 0.985 of PFE, which at current pricing will equal to $49.03. Seems like a pretty automatic gain right?



The only issue I have with this is that investors will try to correct for this gap. Most of the time, the buying company's stock drops since an acquisition is costly. This drop will then affect the end result of the acquisition since part of the deal is 0.985 shares of PFE. That's a variable that you can't control. So if one takes the time to write out an equation and solve it, you could probably come up with an equation that would tell you how high PFE prices would need to be relative to WYE's price to see if it's worthwhile to buy before the acquisition. But for now, it seems like an automatic gain of close to 10%.

Google leads tech sector

So after a bit of a loss across the market, Google (GOOG) did as I expected and led the tech sector with an increase of $18.20/share. That's a 5.94% gain. So even though Google posted a first-ever decrease in earnings, they still beat the estimates most analysts had for them. And investors and analysts love it when a company does better than expected. Now, GOOG closed at $324.70. That means they opened around $300/share mark. This made it quite difficult to have made any money on this stock. You would've need $30+K to get 100 shares, which would've grossed $1,820. I don't know about you, but I don't have $30K lying around. Boo. But then again, making $1,820 in a day on this gamble would've been pretty sweet huh?

(Note: I do not own any shares of GOOG. Too rich for me.)

Google expected to post earnings

So the news is that Google is going to post a better than expected profit. This headline hit a bit later in the day, and the report won't be out till later tonight. GOOG is already up $3.42 (1.13%) as of close, so I say GOOG should go up a bit more in after-trading and tomorrow when the headlines hit all the news circuits. People just love it when a company posts profits in times like these. Let's see if I'm right.

Mob pyschology theory for stocks holding up

So, I'm beginning to think more and more that my idea of mob pyschology is holding up in terms of stock prices. Late in the day yesterday, Apple announced their earnings - very positive. I thought to myself that the stock has been kinda beaten down over the whole Steve Jobs thing. Then in general the market has been pretty grim, with GM losing the top global crown to Toyota after 77 years on top and Bank of America being pretty shaky now after their "forced" acquisition of Merill Lynch. I made a prediction to myself that Apple would definitely go up in after market trades as well as in trading today.

This morning, I told one of my friends that Apple would go up. I just checked and as of 10:40AM, AAPL is up to $88.10, a gain of 6.36%. It's not much, especially since AAPL moved a bit yesterday from news that they are being investigated about the whole Jobs thing (kinda silly to spend the energy on that, but whatever). But as I've said in a previous post, losing Jobs does not mean they will sell less MacBooks and iPods. It doesn't work that way for a company as innovative as they are.

In any case, I'm gonna keep applying my gut feelings to certain headlines and see if the market responds relatively the same way. By the way, even though AAPL is up, rest of market is down, so that 6.36% should be considered a blessing. Now you might ask why I didn't buy AAPL? Well, I told myself to stop buying little bits of stock and to at least buy 25+ shares (preferably 50+) to make any trade worthwhile for me. Commission really eats away at any gains, so it's silly to run around buying 10 shares here and there (although for AAPL, 10 shares yesterday would've been $800+). So I have an excuse to just lay low and test my gut feelings. I just wonder, sometimes, how things would be different if I had $10 - 25K lying around and I made the gambles (I say gambles, cause that's what they were) on AIG, FRE, PALM, and AAPL when I thought of them. Hmm...

(Note: I do not own any shares of AIG, PALM, or AAPL. I do, however, own some nominal shares of FRE.)

Mob psychology

Just to prove my point again about how the market reacts to news/fear about the stock market. Last night, my cousin sent me a link to a story about Apple's Steve Jobs's leave of absence till June to attend to his health issues, which are more "complex" than he thought. I read the news earlier and didn't think too much of it, but after my cousin sent it to me I thought the stock would definitely react. Sure enough, by closing yesterday, stock was down 2.71%. Today, the news hit the rest of the news outlet and right now AAPL is down 4.59%.

Now I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to think Jobs isn't the only reason Apple is as successful as it is today. Sure, he is mostly responsible for the innovation and success Apple has enjoyed of late. However, I'd like to think that Jobs is business-savvy enough to surround himself with other smart people such that there is not a total collapse should Jobs ever leave or move on or even "move on." I mean, if there is no plan in place at all, I'd be very disappointed in Apple as a company.

Let's think logically for a minute. Would Jobs's leave of absence really mean the DRM-less Apple store will suffer? Does this mean the supposed iPhone nano would sell any less? Does it even mean people would buy iPods, iPhones, MacBooks, and all things white and glorious any less? I really doubt it. If anything, this slumping economy would have a bigger effect. Stop panicking and look at the company numbers.

(Note: I do not own any shares of AAPL, much like I don't own an iPod)

Missed the Boat again

Now if you invest in the stock market, you probably know there are two types of investing. One, you pick companies with actual value in them and you buy and hold for the long term. This is usually the smarter move. The other type is pretty much gambling. If you watch the market close enough, you start to see patterns. In fact, a psychology major might do pretty well, since most people in the market are regular people like me and you or just prospectors reacting to buzz and news.

Anyway, Palm was doing their announcement for their "new-ness" they were buzzing about. I knew that this announcement was going to make or break them, so I didn't want to make any moves market-wise. Well, I stayed on top of the announcement and realized that Palm had a pretty good contender for the smartphone category. I figure I was too late to enter so I didn't buy any shares. Palm was up $0.09 after the announcement. A small blip. Well, by the end of the day, Palm was up $1.15. A near 30% gain. I kicked myself a bit, but didn't think too much. I missed the mob buying in and I'll live with it. Well, I just checked again today and Palm is up another $1.62 (35%). Boy, am I pretty annoyed now.

Now Palm is a decent company that made a lot of money on Palm Pilots and then the Treo before the smartphone market exploded. But they made some not so good decision recently and paid for it with loss of market share. So this buy would've been a gamble. But this was a good gamble that I missed. Here are the reasons and lessons that I've learned from this:

1) A floundering decent company buzzing about some new product garners a lot of attention. People either want to see them succeed and comeback or watch the company crash and burn. So a lot of eyes were on this announcement.
2) The new Palm pre is pretty darn cool. It isn't as revolutionary as the iPhone when it came out, but it definitely makes it's presence known among the iPhones, Storms, and G1's out there. They have wireless charging and a pretty slick OS.
3) The market can be slow to respond with tentative news like this. Usually the market goes up on the rumor and down on the actual news (recent bank bailouts and auto bailouts). But this one, people weren't confident Palm could do it. Palm announced the Centro and the Treo Pro to very little fanfare. So when Palm announced the WebOS and the pre (and they were actually pretty good), it was a bit unexpected. Therefore, the market didn't respond till after it sunk in that they might actually comeback as a real contender in the consumer smartphone market.

In any case, I missed the big gain. We'll see how they price the pre to see how Palm will do in the future. Hopefully, Palm realized that they need to keep up with the other competitors and keep the "new-ness" coming and not just update the pre for another five years like they did with the Treo.

Oh, in case you were wondering, if you had 100 shares in the morning yesterday, you would have made $260+ right now. But again, it would have been a gamble. Palm could've just as easily announced a Treo 900 or the market might not have responded so well. So if you're risk-adverse, go buy Coco-Cola. As someone said: "Economy good, people drink Coke. Economy bad, people drink Coke."