"Realistic"? Shorting a stock is not a pure mathematical bet that a stock will, in the fullness of time, be viewed as overvalued, it's a concrete bet about pric

"Realistic"? Shorting a stock is not a pure mathematical bet that a stock will, in the fullness of time, be viewed as overvalued, it's a concrete bet about prices in the near term. :) Plenty of people called the 90s dot com bubble, shorted tech stocks, then lost everything because the bubble kept going until they ran out of cash to make short bets. Same with the housing market more recently. If you could magically know that Company X's stock is overvalued, and that it WILL collapse at some point, but you couldn't figure out when, just a vague "sometime in the next 10 years", going long would be a good way to lose money (it will collapse eventually), but going short would also be a good way to lose money. Timing matters just as much as direction.