With so many events causing uncertainty and potentially reversing the market direction (new president, arguably overvalued market, fed interest rate hike, etc) as a non-active trader I have been thinking about ways to hedge or potentially profit from a potential market downturn.
For background I’ve been buying (and occasionally selling) stocks for a long time (10+years), I watch the markets fairly closely and follow the news for the stocks I own but I don't really have the time or confidence to trade in and out of my positions all the time or get involved in options trading but I want to attempt to at least position myself so I’m not always 100% betting on the market going up all the time.
I was thinking about buying a short S&P 500 ETF such as SH with the idea being I could sell if the market drops significantly at some point to either lock in cash gains or perhaps use the proceeds to buy more shares in my long term positions at what would likely be historically lower prices\valuations. My theory is while my long term positions may lose value on paper due (something I can live with as I’ve already been through a major downturn) but they will eventually return to previous levels over the long term and I will have taken advantage of the market reversal to some extent without doing anything too risky. On the flip side if the market just keeps marching up or even shoots up drastically if Hillary wins I would have a paper loss in the short term on the short ETF but it seems like with enough time there will eventually be a correction or downturn and this position could then be sold at a profit. Does this sound like a reasonably sound idea or is there something I’m missing?
Submitted November 08, 2016 at 09:26AM by PickleSalesman http://ift.tt/2fPvI4r
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