Yes, if TSLA is 1% of S&P500, short $1,000 of TSLA shares for every $100,000 of SPY you own. And then dynamically hedge as the price fluctuates. This doesn’t really work unless you can borrow on margin for cheap and have lots of money (unless you can short partial shares, lol)
Not saying it’s a good idea, only that it’s possible
There are a lot of illusory ideas out there for beating the market. But I do believe there’s at least one way to do so without any special expertise, and that’s to studiously avoid being sucked into the frenzied, speculative bubbles that seem to reliably take hold of a significant fraction of the population.
In an efficient market, one might expect the smart, rational players to correct these bubbles. But once they’ve sold all their own holdings, you’re left with a Winner’s Curse [1] dynamic where the most (irrationally) optimistic investors are the ones ultimately setting the price. And essentially the only way the rational players can affect things from there is through short-selling, thereby risking running afoul of Keynes’ famous adage about the market remaining irrational for longer than they can remain solvent.
Thus there can fairly regularly arise situations in which somewhat common knowledge has it that some asset is overvalued, without the price of that asset collapsing. Until eventually it does.
It seems to me, then, that it’s not so foolish to attempt to get some of the diversification benefits of an index fund, while avoiding particular components whose valuations seem to defy rationality.
Per Ray Dalio's "Holy Grail" math, supposedly you'd buy the top 7, 15, or 20 uncorrelated equities from the S&P 500, and capitalization-weight them yourself by hand.
Everyone please be careful buying puts if you're not doing it for insurance against current holdings. If you're buying anywhere outside of the .30 delta and less than 21 days until expiration (even then) you're probably buying a lottery ticket.
The average person would be better off buying 10 x $5 scratch off lottery tickets tomorrow and accepting the result... than buying a far out of the money short dated put.
quickthrowman|5 years ago
Not saying it’s a good idea, only that it’s possible
javagram|5 years ago
The whole point of passive investing in an index is that you don’t need to concern yourself with the individual index components.
Compare VV (Vanguard Large Cap ETF) with VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) and their performance is very correlated despite VV owning Tesla and VOO not.
Currently VV is slightly over-performing VOO but it might or might not reverse in the future.
DavidSJ|5 years ago
In an efficient market, one might expect the smart, rational players to correct these bubbles. But once they’ve sold all their own holdings, you’re left with a Winner’s Curse [1] dynamic where the most (irrationally) optimistic investors are the ones ultimately setting the price. And essentially the only way the rational players can affect things from there is through short-selling, thereby risking running afoul of Keynes’ famous adage about the market remaining irrational for longer than they can remain solvent.
Thus there can fairly regularly arise situations in which somewhat common knowledge has it that some asset is overvalued, without the price of that asset collapsing. Until eventually it does.
It seems to me, then, that it’s not so foolish to attempt to get some of the diversification benefits of an index fund, while avoiding particular components whose valuations seem to defy rationality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner's_curse
andrewmcwatters|5 years ago
aeternum|5 years ago
SheinhardtWigCo|5 years ago
redorb|5 years ago
The average person would be better off buying 10 x $5 scratch off lottery tickets tomorrow and accepting the result... than buying a far out of the money short dated put.
curious_fella1|5 years ago