It's a smart move. What's price of the put BTW? Did you feel that people were concerned about an immediate fall that Put was expensive at that moment?

I bought S&P puts at the wrong time so many times that I just gave up, didn't trust my gut in early Feb, assumed the market would find some strange way to keep going up. Oops.

What’s the point? Instead of spending money on stocks and puts against the same stocks (which costs money), why not just allocate less to stocks in the first place?

The reasons I could imagine is if the stock is illiquid (401k, lockup, etc)

Congrats on winning the lottery.

Long term yours is a losing strategy.

Me too. I bought 10 contracts on SPY puts 5 days before the drop, expiring January. My first target is the Dec 2018 lows but I expect a 50% drop before the end of the year.

I love how people are self righteous about the timing but I have been wildly profitable over the last 20 years picking my spots like this.

I agree with that but do you know you’re going to take a 20% hair cut? What if you get out of the market after it drops 6% at the bell tomorrow and then it goes up 1% the day after and 3% the day after that? Do you panic buy back in? What happens if someone finds out that a cheap readily available drug cures it and this whole thing is over in three weeks?

I’m extremely pessimistic about the market right now, but I’m more pessimistic that if I traded that I wouldn’t lose more money.

I’ve had a big chunk of my 401k sitting on the sidelines for months now. I’m going to wait to see how this virus thing shakes out then use it to buy back in after it looks like the worst is over.

Until then, there’s way too much uncertainty to try and trade this. I’m not retiring for twenty years. Whatever happens it should bounce back in 2-3 years or so.

>The idea that you should just sit back and be ok with a 20% haircut isn’t something that I will just “take” if I can help it.

You don't have to be an active trader to preserve your capital. I've been invested for years but around the 2nd week of Feb, I went 100% cash. This time I saw train and got off the tracks. My plan is to average in slowly over time as the market stabilizes and the news gets better.

You are waving around a winning lottery ticket as evidence of your strategy being better. What is your strategy? First of all, was this put even good? How much of your portfolio did you cover and how much as a fraction did it cost? But much more importantly, how many times have you hedged your portfolio in the last eleven years?

Hedges cost money. Market goes up long term. You will lose money long-term by hedging. That's the steady state of your strategy. That's the obvious reason why people don't hedge. I'm puzzled as to why you didn't acknowledge this. Instead, you offer an outlier where hedging performed better. Seems deeply disingenuous.

Value investors don't time the market, though it can seem like timing. To the extent to which one can assess a personal 'intrinsic value' to a company, one can buy when it is substantially undervalued and sell when it is substantially overvalued.

One can see this in Berkshire's cash hoard. Expect to see it deployed in the year to come, when valuations may become more in-line with historical norms.

Buying at a low point is lucrative, sure, but how will you know when we're at a low point?

Should you have bought or sold Friday? Should you buy or sell this coming Monday? Answering these questions accurately is in fact hard.

> Some basic timing is not all that hard and can easily double your gains.

If it was that easy everyone would do it, or at least the "simple basic timing"-fund with twice the gain would be more popular than any etf.

But probably more realistic you are just deluding yourself.

SARS was a close relative of Covid-19. No vaccine was developed:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syn...