Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

What are the most efficient ways to bet on an individual stock beating the market?
tl;dr: Unfortunately, there is little available to the retail investor that fits your description. Institutional investors can use swaps to gain leverage on the above trade.  A bank will build a basket of long MSFT and short SPY and then quote a rate against LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) and a margin requirement.  So at the end of the swap the bank will pay the difference in total return between MSFT and SPY and the investor will pay some amount of cash back.  The nice thing for the investor is that the margin requirement will often be fairly small if their credit is good so the investor can lever the trade up significantly. A retail investor could call up your broker and try to get the above but on the off chance they let you the margin requirement might be higher than just going short the SPY. If you aren't a retail investor, you might be able to do something like be long a 3X tech ETF and short 3X SPY ETF.  If you are very clever you might be able to combine multiple levered tech ETFs to get something like 3X MSFT.  However, I would strongly caution against levered etfs for most retail investors as the fees are high and levered etfs tend to strongly drift away from the index against the investor over anything but the shortest time periods.