Back in Black!

It appears that my discretionary portfolio has managed to stage a precarious turnaround for the year. This past week it managed to pull out a year to date return of 1.14%. This doesn’t really sound all that great, until you put it up against the market’s return. The S&P500 is currently down 9.46% Year to Date (that’s as of Thursday’s close).

+1.14% sounds a lot better than -9.46%, though much of that return has been driven by my bottom-feeding on Bank of America. Whether those gains will hold as the year progresses is anyone’s guess at this point!

In other news I’ve really been focused on creating additional streams of alternate income. While my emergency fund is well buffered and my investments continue to grow, I’ve been searching for ways outside of my current job to bring in more money. While I wouldn’t be completely opposed to a part-time job after work..I’m not sure if I’d like to take that route unless I really need to (if circumstances demanded, I’d be working all day and night).

One such idea that has come to fruition is the concept of building small niche sites. These are small and informational nature, with very specific keywords targeted for a particular topic. Our first project was focused on a hybrid car, with back links from various blogs and other sites, we’ve managed to pull in about 20-30$ a month in ad revenue. Not something to retire on, but we update the site once a month (takes about 15 minutes) and the money rolls in. Talk about passive! Whether we’ll be able to replicate that success in future endeavors is of course the million dollar question, but I’m not complaining!