582
SpaceX stock drops to a new low and loses $1 trillion in value in a month
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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Technology
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How does one short a stock? Like what is the process? Do I need a special broker?
Shorting a stock is a bad plan. You typically need collateral (cash, or a line of credit, or something) in case the short goes bad. Shorting a stock can have a theoretically infinite loss since if you buy a share of a company and it goes bankrupt, your maximum loss is the value of the share. Short selling means you've sold a share you don't own with a pinky swear that you'll buy one back to replace it. A stock likely won't, but could, go infinitely high. In that case you'd have infinite losses.
The other way is options trading. You can do this with your normal broker, possibly. You'll need to make statements about your income level, savings, risk tolerance, and check a box saying you've read some mandated documentation. The process can seem like click-through stuff for a normal website, but it's absolving the brokerage of fault if your decisions go bad.
Options work a little like an insurance contract. If you are worried that you're too heavily tilted towards a certain company (but still believe in the investment), you can buy "puts" that help mitigate the risk if the underlying security. A "call" is a contract that lets you hedge the other way. They let you get exposure to a security without having to purchase the shares. An options contract is a contract that gives you the right, but not the obligation to buy (call) or sell (put) some number (typically 100) of an underlying security by a certain date. Selling options naked is a topic better left for someone else to explain all the risks involved (and I covered a strategy that has infinite risk).
A call pays off if the stock shoots up before the contract expires, and a put pays off if the stock tanks. To do what you're saying you'd have to buy puts (I'm not an investment advisor, I'm not your investment advisor, this is not investment advice). If it sounds like gambling that's because it is. Everybody already had the idea to bet against SPCX. There are platforms out there that let you look and see without having to risk money, and that's probably the best course of action.
I picked the date September 18, 2026 at random. If you had a September 18 130P, then it went up 21.19% Friday, kudos. The "last price" field is PER SHARE, and the contract was probably for 100 shares, so that's $2030, meaning you had four figures on the line there. If none of that makes sense, if the activity in the volume field doesn't make sense, then it's better to sit it out. In that realm you're swapping your money for that contract, and someone else is swapping that contract for your (now their) money. If the contract expires out of the money, you lose.
Some resources:
There have been suicides from people who didn’t really understand how shorting works.
Thank you for the detailed analysis. I really want to... but the rational side of me says I shouldn't 😆.
I've seen a few news stories through the years where I thought the stock movement was out of whack with the underlying security, and options are a way to "bet" on that being right. It's cheap and easy to just watch. Almost every time I was wrong and only found out a few times why. That probably just means I'm bad at it.
A few more things to remember. If you look at the first link at the bottom of my post, there are ways to structure buying/selling the calls/puts so that you can have a strategy that pays off if the stock goes up, down, or stays the same. How to set those up and the math involved is beyond me. The other thing is that for every trade with options someone makes there's an entity on the other side of it. You might be buying a part of the leg of someone else's more complex trade where a big investment house is trying to manage their risk and keep it below a certain level.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/business/robinhood-suicide-alex-kearns/
Stay smart and safe, invest money you can afford to lose in products you understand.
This is just gambling with extra steps. Thanks for the analysis and your time to write all that up, though.
If you think the whole stock market looks like a bubble right now, you could invest in commodities and wait for the crash indefinitely.
IMHO it's better to not trust the stock market at all. It's a big club and we ain't in it.
You have 3 options. 2 are options. You can buy a put contract. You can sell a call contract, or you can just sell shares you don’t own. All of these require special permissions from your broken as they each come with their own fun risk profile.