One of my good friends follows a strategy like this by simply buying puts against SPX. He is very bearish on the market in general, and has missed out on a lot

One of my good friends follows a strategy like this by simply buying puts against SPX. He is very bearish on the market in general, and has missed out on a lot of growth in the last decade, but in his case it did “finally pay off” recently. As with any other strategy, though, it’s not really valid to compare just the recent months, you’d have to evaluate his total return over say the last ten years, and I don’t know how that stacks up.