Stock markets scare me, too much uncertainty.
I couldn't imagine giving money away on the hope of getting more!
I made/still make money from no investment, other than my time.
Okay so its not mega money, and i do it in my spare time, and there are no physical goods involved..
So basically my niche is bands, rock bands really.
I wrote a program that harvests data from facebook, the band name, the amount of likes they have and if the have an email address, if they do, it saves them to a database, likes there page and randomly opens another band on the links below 'other bands you may like' etc and carries on. I run it once a month and collect 2000 database entries.
Then I have a simcard dongle that i use, and again another program that emails the bands a covering letter all nice and polite just like a newsletter including a link to my website that sells facebook likes.
I use a dongle because of the dynamic ip and spam blocking etc, but also give the bands an unsubscribe link as per rules.
They add them to the shopping cart and purchase them entering the relevant details, the money goes to my paypal and I get an email which auto orders the likes from a user on fiverr.com who invoices me monthly. 1000 likes costs me $5 and i sell for £40, most people order 1000, but they always come back for more, my highest order was for 500,000 likes.
I get about £700-£1200 per month from that.
It needs little or no effort from me, and after the gruelling process of coding i can now reap rewards. I wish it was fully automated.
I have done it for the past 9 months and its funded some amazing stuff. Sometimes bands will tell their families about it, and i have even had tattooists/studios even travel companies buy them..
There are always haters, and people that say its illegal etc, it isn't - its just means facebook think i'm a bad man. If they send me a c&d then ill stop
Until then, I reap from my invested time.