All investments involve taking either a long or short position. Individual investors are generally more familiar with going long, which means buying a stock that you think will go higher in price. But in bear markets, where everything seems to go down, for those wanting to profit from an expected decline in price, an investor can take a short position.

What Is Short Selling?

Short selling means that you sell a stock you don’t own. To short a stock, you will first need to borrow it from your broker. Brokers can use stock from another investor’s account to loan it to you or they might borrow it from another brokerage firm. After you make the short sale, the proceeds are credited to your account. Eventually you will need to close the short position by buying back the same number of shares and returning them to your broker. If the price drops, you buy back the stock at a lower price and make a profit. You will suffer a loss if the price of the stock rises because you have to buy it back at the higher price.

Why Do You Short Sell?

There are a couple of reasons to short a stock. The most obv just to bet on lower prices. If you think a stock is overpriced, shorting it gives you an opportunity to turn your opinion into potential profits. Another reason to enter a short trade is to hedge a long position. If you want to continue holding stock for the long-term, but fear it is overvalued in the short-term, you could reduce that short-term risk by shorting the stock or an index related to the stock. If the price declines, you will not suffer any loss since the short profits will offset the long losses.

When Should You Short Sell?

The question investors face is when to go short. It is easy to say that stocks are overvalued. For example, in the Internet bubble in the late-1990s, stocks with no earnings sold for hundreds of dollars a share. Yet, many large investors went broke trying to short them – the market had become irrational. The great economist John Maynard Keynes is believed to have said, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

Technical analysis can be used to find overvalued stocks that are likely to decline. In the bubble at the end of the twentieth century, stocks were very strong and went up in price, despite the fact that they were fundamentally overvalued. Technical analysis looks only at price to determine the trend, ignoring earnings and other fundamental criteria.

A simple tool to find short candidates is to determine the trend with a moving average. Looking at a 200-day moving average, you would only short stocks trading below that indicator. Figure 1 presents an example of this idea. The price of the S&P 500 index crossed below its 200-day moving average in December 2007 and remained below it throughout the devastating bear market of 2008 and 2009. Looking at a chart with this single indicator would have shown investors it was best to avoid long trades.

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Figure 1: The S&P 500 fell below its 200-day moving average since December 2007 and stayed there throughout a 50 percent decline.

The moving average tells us what side of the market to be on – long if the price is above the moving average or short when price is below the moving average.