Every day, the stock market seems to continue its precipitous drop towards worthlessness, crushing hopes, dreams, and investors in a flurry of dizzying price movements. So when do we hit bottom? Of course, nobody knows.
Yet there is an answer; a light in the darkness, used by the masters of investment to generate excess returns even ” no, scratch that, – especially in falling markets like this one.
Shorting A Stock.
The phrase sends a blood-curdling chill down many a buy-and-hold investors spine, frightening them into a shock-induced state of confusion. Yet for masters of this easier-then-it-sounds technique, its an extremely profitable oasis within the uncompromising desert that is this bear.
Confused? Well there’s no need ot be. Let’s take it step by step. First of all, the vast majority of investors only buy stocks. When you buy a stock, there are two ways to make money. Stock price appreciation (buy low, sell high), and dividends. Which is all well and good when the market is going up, but for markets such as the one were currently embroiled in, we need a whole different animal.
To short a stock is essentially to sell it, and then buy it at a later date. Counter-intuitive, no? In the shorting process, you borrow the stock from your broker, sell it on the open market, and when the price has fallen sufficiently, you buy it back again, and return it to your broker.
An example… back in early October, Kellogg (Symbol: K) was trading for around $56.00 per share. Over the next two months, it dropped from just over $55.00, to $42.00 per share. Shorting 100 shares of Kellogg would have, in this instance, had a profit of $1,400. The procedure would be the following. When you short the stock at $56.00, you borrow 100 shares from your broker, and sell them on the open market, giving you $5,600. Later on, you decide to buy back those shares, and return them to your broker, while Kellogg is at $42.00. This costs you $4,200. Now you have covered your short position, for a profit of $1,400. Not to bad for two months, and a relatively small $5,600 investment.
For those abstract thinkers, it may be easier to conceptualize shorting as simply buying a negative number of shares. When you own 500 shares of a company, and the companies stock price increases by $1.00, you make $500. When you own -500 shares of a company, and the companies stock price increases by $1.00, you lose $500. However, when you own -500 shares, and that company then plummets by 5$, now you stand to gain $2,500. As they say, the bull goes up the stairs, but the bear goes out the window. Markets fall faster then they rise, so the time to make money is now!
Even still, shorting stocks has risks. If you choose the one stock of 100 that is about to start trending upwards, you could lose some money on that. Different sectors of the economy may also be effected by events that cause exceptions to the everything goes down in bear markets rule. The recent auto bailout could feasibly cause industrials to go up for a while, so shorting industrials could choose to be a bad choice. The biggest risk is that the bear market turns into a bull market while your not paying attention " that could rack up losses on many positions at once.
One standard practice among investment professionals is the 5% rule. This rule is used when deciding how many shares of a company to buy/short, and is an invaluable tool when shorting stocks. Lets say you want to short a $15 stock, but your not sure how many shares to short. First take the amount of money in your portfolio, say, $10000. Then, take 5% of that. $500. That is the amount you can risk on this transaction.
Next determine the most logical stop loss. Lets say you decide if the stock goes above $17.50, youll sell your shares using a stop loss. If you can lose 2.50 per share, and your willing to risk $500, then you would short 200 shares of the stock, maximum. Many risk adverse investors choose only 2 or 3%, but 5% serves as a good maximum for even most risk-tolerant investors.
When it comes to stock picking, some people would call this a challenging market. And traditionally, we have been taught that buying low and selling high is the idea scenario, so looked at from that sense, perhaps it is a challenging market. Or is it? With everything covered already in this short document, you have already learned that a so called “challenging market” can be a bonanza for those who have learned how to short a stock or etf. Author: Jordan Weir
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tolopyTot 09.21.09 at 3:28 pm
Hello everyone!
I would like to burn a theme at here. There is such a thing, called HYIP, or High Yield Investment Program. It reminds of financial piramyde, but in rare cases one may happen to meet a company that really pays up to 2% daily not on invested money, but from real profits.