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.

He's also 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.

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.

From a practical perspective 99.999% of people can short most stocks as much as their net worth will allow. And there are many options trading out over a year.

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.

Do you actually think that reciting this quote is contributing to the discussion? Maybe you should tell us the alphabet next.

It's a good counterpoint to the equally throw away argument that "if you disagreed with x you should have shorted it".

The problem with shorting is you can't just be right about the eventual direction... You have to be pretty bang on with the timing as well.

Therefore it's absolutely possible for people to suspect or have strong belief that something is unsustainable without having the liquidity or confidence on timing to take action on it.

No it's not to say there aren't Perma bears and other I told you so people crawling out of the woodwork, but that doesn't mean that every person who didn't capitalize on this is Monday-morning quarterbacking.

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