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Comment by sabellito | Hacker News Reader

> but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable.

Did you short all these companies and are currently a billionaire? Since it took only half a brain to know.

He's also probably not an accredited investor, selling a stock short in any significant volume is not like making a retail purchase. It can be quite hard to make money off knowing a stock will crash, and that's not even accounting for needing to know _when_ precisely since most of the ways involve short dated options. I gave up after investigating ways to bet on interest rate hikes and market corrections, and just went cash heavy at the end of 2021. That doesn't make you a billionaire it makes you just not lose principle.

> He's also not an accredited investor

I bet 50% of US-based HN readers are.

Buying some puts also works.

lol exactly (https://xkcd.com/451)

"i need to short a stock"

"have you tried options?"

buying puts probably isn't going to make you a billionaire though? The maximum return is the difference between the strike and the lowest price before expiration, and prices generally don't drop to 0. Realistically, you would need access to a lot of leverage to become a billionaire with puts, or already be a multi-millionaire.

Most people on HN probably are - especially those at FAANG.

It's just 2 years with 200k individual or 300k combined income, or 1M NAV.

True, this was the wrong way to phrase it on my part. What I should have said is "they probably aren't a professional investor who knows what they are doing and has access to lots of capital or leverage, and a Bloomberg terminal or whatever people use these days to locate stock to borrow and sell short".

the economist John Maynard Keynes notably said, “the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

A good thing to remember when you're tempted to sell short.

Isn’t part of shorting also predicting when the drop will happen?

Yeah, I shorted during the pandemic but missed the drop several times. Everyone knew to short, it's the when that nobody could fathom.

I don't know how you think investing works, but you can't become a billionaire unless you are already a 900 millionaire

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