There's basically two ways: 1) You go short the underlying market(s), that is you sell them. Individuals don't (as far as I know) have access to the repo (repu

There's basically two ways: 1) You go short the underlying market(s), that is you sell them. Individuals don't (as far as I know) have access to the repo (repurchase) markets. What you do here is borrow a stock, sell it, then buy it back later to return to the guy you borrowed from. If the market has gone down you can buy it back for less than you sold it, hence making a profit. The other way to short a market is a) sell calls or b) buy puts. These _are_ available to the individual. A put gives you the option to sell a stock at some predetermined price. If the stock falls below that price (the strike) then you can sell it at a price above the market. You prob don't want to sell a call as this gives you unlimited downside if teh market rallies :). There are also more complex strategies such as call spreads, risk reversals etc which give you varying pay-off profiles. 2) You go long (buy) assets which are negatively correlated with the market you want to short. E.g if the eurozone implodes will see the following: dollar and yen will appreciate against the euro, treasuries will appreciate. Gold would normally appreciate as traditional safe haven but the outlook for this is way less certain: it's getting hammered at the moment, partly due to underlying global economic concerns (ie industrial demand for gold will drop) plus people are having to sell gold to meet margin calls on losses in equities. this has triggered further selling by the chinese who are long gold and getting squeezed. Also the swiss franc would normally be a safe haven, but the SNB is defending the level of the ccy at 1.2 vs the euro to protect swiss exports and tourism. The problem is that the yen, dollar and treasuries aren't great places to park cash: safe yes, you won't lose anything but rates are so low you won't really earn anything either.