Going Long On Going Short

Michael’s recent review of Short Screen raised a lot of comments from readers over risk and how best to manage it. Personally, I don’t think going short on a stock is riskier than going long. In fact, in some cases going short can be less risky. The key isn’t whether you go long or short, the key is knowing what you’re doing and that’s the problem with most investors. They don’t know.

The same is true of blogging. Most bloggers never make more than a few dollars with their blogs because they don’t know how to properly monetize it. The key to everything is knowledge – the more you know, the better your chances of success. If you want to learn about making money by blogging, you can read my blog, Problogger, Copy Blogger and others. If you want to make money shorting stocks, then sites like Timothy Skyes and Short Screen are a good source of knowledge.

I Don’t Want To Learn It, I Just Want To Make Money From It. Is That Possible?

It’s pretty hard to make money from blogging without learning how to do it. However, it is possible to “auto trade” the stock transactions of a successful trader. I will be the first to admit that I will never be as good at shorting stocks as my buddy Tim Skyes. However, I can dupicate his trades using Covestor. The service monitors Tim’s account and if he makes a trade, I will make the same trade within two minutes.

Covestor allows you to auto trade the accounts of many traders. They rank each trader by performance (Tim is the #1 ranked trader with 146,540.3% return since Nov 2007). The one downside is you need a minimum deposit of $50,000 to auto trade Tim’s account. Don’t have that kind of money? Then you can take the longer, but potentially more rewarding, route of learning this stuff by reading Tim’s blog or becoming a member of Short Screen.

Happy Black Friday!