If you time a short bet perfectly then yes you can make multimegabucks, but arguably you'd have better odds playing the powerball. Soros and Taleb are both grea

If you time a short bet perfectly then yes you can make multimegabucks, but arguably you'd have better odds playing the powerball. Soros and Taleb are both great examples of survivor bias attributing their success to personal virtue. Edit: What I'm trying to say is most people most of the time will be better off making long bullish bets. For example I bought some deep out of the money AAPL calls in June of this year and I'm quite pleased with how that turned out. It more than paid for the mistakes I made. The way I see it is think like a venture capitalist. Place 20 bets that pay out 100-1 and try to arrange for at least one to pay out.