You Can Still Make Money on the Short Side, but It's Tough

When I added Cemex (CX) and Vulcan Materials (VMC) as shorts Monday, to create some downside hedges - I offered my third choice would have been Shanda Interactive (SNDA) ... indeed if I was not writing down all my material moves on the website, I offered in "the real world" I would have done this transaction.

In the real world, I'd probably place a short here (20 day moving average) with a very tiny stop loss (within 1%) - but I don't want to bother writing the transactions out on the website ("I'm short!" but 20 minutes later "I'm stopped out!"), so I'm skipping it at this level, but it's one of my outstanding short limit orders and worthwhile for the nimble...

In retrospect that one actually would of worked, to the tune of 7%!  Which in this type of market is akin to 25% considering how strong the market is.  That gain actually would of offset the 2 losses in CX and VMC nicely and kept us flat among the 3 short positions - which is a victory in this sort of circumstance.  So a bit of misfortune as I did not take the trade that did work, and instead went with two that the market melt up helped carry up.  But it sure isn't easy to have anything on the short side of the ledger.

As Jim Cramer says .. there is always a bear market somewhere.  Err...

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