Betting Against a Stock: Short Selling
You can try to profit from a stock going DOWN, not just up - but the risk profile flips completely.
Short selling means borrowing shares you don't own, selling them immediately, and hoping to buy them back later at a lower price - pocketing the difference. If you're right, you profit as the price falls.
The catch: if you're wrong and the price rises instead, your losses aren't capped at the amount you invested the way a normal ('long') position's losses are. A stock can only go to $0 (capping a long loss at 100%), but it can rise indefinitely (making a bad short's loss theoretically unlimited).
This is why short selling is generally considered a much higher-risk, more advanced strategy than simply buying and holding.
High-volatility names like TSLA are frequently discussed in the context of short selling precisely because big, fast moves in either direction make the position's risk very real, very quickly.
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