I wonder how this strategy is affected by the 2008 experience. You see, back then all sorts of, frankly, illegal measures were used to prevent those who bet aga

I wonder how this strategy is affected by the 2008 experience. You see, back then all sorts of, frankly, illegal measures were used to prevent those who bet against the housing market to cash out. Markets were frozen, contracts and even stocks artificially priced, for most investors right until the contracts were worthless due to bankruptcy, as pointed out in "the Big Short". Yes, VERY few investors did exactly the right thing at exactly the right time and got lucky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQTbbUASPLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQTbbUASPLQ Wall Street outright lied to offload known crashed investments to unsuspecting buyers. Again, this is obviously highly illegal. Nobody got punished, we can argue about why not, but one can remark it would have seriously affected the government. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whlzFWwVv98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whlzFWwVv98 It would have made both parties unelectable for a century because Will Emerson would have been forced "to take his hand off the scale". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU (second part of this clip, after 1m05s) The banks will not play fair. This can be proven by pointing out that they simply can't. If they make profits, they get those out of the company rapidly, and by design, the system cannot pay out the contracts it underwrites beyond a minimal "safety margin". They simply cannot cover the contracts they underwrite in the event of a crash, they don't have the money. You'd have to hope that the FED covers those contracts ... and ... not even if hell freezes over will they do so. And of course even this is ignoring real "black swan" events. Here's the thing: if a real meteor or comet hits earth, for example, black swan investors won't get paid ... and they won't even care.