Comment by unyttigfjelltol 3 days ago
> It can put you at unlimited risk even if you are absolutely right.
The risk is in borrowing, not short selling. How many momo jockies out there think about the "unlimited risk" from buying Tesla on margin? In that case, you're shorting USD, but no one talks about that because it always will be fashionable to short USD.
Just like it always will be fashionable to short JPY, for carry and more. Until it's not.
In either case, your broker will liquidate you around $0. Not guaranteed, but very likely. This is the key risk.
Tether provides a good illustration of the principle I mentioned-- which I concede is a bit theoretical in the case of USD:
Tether is supposed to trade at $1 and gets press when it trades below. But, sometimes it also trades above, at $1.01, $1.02 and even perhaps $1.03. So, if you sold a lot of it thinking trading higher was impossible, you can be surprised.
Stocks are generally not considered tied to currency- if the company has some fundamental value, that should be inflation proof.
So technically buying almost any stock can be a way of shorting the USD in that you are selling it now and will buy it back later.
The risk - besides that of the company itself- I suppose is that if you have massive deflation you will end up with less USD. I don’t think anyone is worried about massive deflation of the USD, since the Fed can and would prevent that.
Buying BTC is shorting money printing by your government.
Today the only government (that I know of) committed to not printing money is Argentina but they have other issues affecting their economy and therefore inflating their currency.
Given that governments don't seem to have desire stop money printing any time soon, buying BTC is sound.
> Today the only government (that I know of) committed to not printing money is Argentina [...]
You don't know many countries, do you?
Argentina still prints more money, and has higher inflation, than most places around the world.
Singapore and Switzerland are some examples of nicely conservative monetary policy.
The 2010s called, they want their talking points back. The Fed has been doing quantitative tightening for the last couple of years while raising rates. Only towards the end of last year did they start lowering the rates again, but they are still doing QT. So, there is no, what you call, "money printing", which in itself is a complete misnomer as it ignores the complexities and actual transmission mechanisms of "quantitative easing". In either case, Bitcoin has proven that it offers no hedge against anything; it is merely a risk asset with no intrinsic value that tends to rally with all the other rubbish like meme stocks.
Short selling a stock means borrowing shares and selling them.