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Comment by skgoa | Hacker News Reader

That's not a good argument. Shorting into a bubble is super dangerous, because while you can be highly certain that the bubble will pop, you can't predict how high it will go before it pops. The optimal way to trade a bubble is to be long for as long as your risk tolerance allows and then you stay flat. You only short once the bubble has popped.

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Exactly, in my experience bubbles always last longer than expected. One example strategy: buy, and then sell half every time it doubles. You've turned an exponential gain into a linear gain, but once you've done that first sale you've de-risked the pop date.

If you cannot provide precise timing, it is by definition not a bubble, it's just confirmation bias around a volatile asset.

Please stop using the word "bubble." It tells you absolutely nothing useful about the price of Bitcoin tomorrow.

Sorry, I don’t see your reasoning here.

I could’ve saw that the NASDAQ was in a bubble in January 2000 and shorted it.

My timing of the top would’ve obviously been off, and I could’ve gotten margin called and forcibly liquidated (with realized losses) by the time it was at peak in March 2000. That does not mean there was no dot-com bubble, just that you could lose hard shorting at the wrong time.

There are ways to avoid margin calls with options, but time would still be working against you with theta decay, so you could still lose money if your timing is off.

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