Where should I invest to hedge against the stock market going down?
If you believe the stock market will be down 20-30% in the next few months, sell your stock holdings, buy a protective put option for the value of the holdings that you want to keep. That would be hedging against it. Anything more is speculating that the market will fall. If you were certain you would probably do best by short selling an ETF that tracked the index for the market you think was about to tank. You'd certainly make a lot more money on that strategy than precious metals. If you were feeling super confident and want to make your money earn even more, you could also buy a bunch of put options on those same ETF funds. Obligatory Warning: Short selling and options can be extremely risky. While most investments cap your potential losses to your total investment, a short sale has no theoretical limit to the amount of money you can lose. Sometimes the simple ways are the best: Put Options. They're less risky than shorting, and have similar upsides. The major difference is that if the price goes up, you're just out the underwriting price. You'll also need to know when the event will happen, or you risk being outwaited.  More traditionally, an investor would pull their money out of the market and move into Treasury bonds. Recall that when the market tanked in 2008, the price of treasuries jumped. Problem is, you can only do that trade once, and it hasn't really unwound yet. And the effect is most pronounced on short term treasuries, so you have to babysit the investment. Because of this, I think some people have moved into commodities like gold, but there's a lot of risk there. Worst case scenario you have a lot of shiny metal you can't eat or use. There are multiple ETFs which inversely track the common indices, though many of these are leveraged.  For example, SDS tracks approximately -200% of the S&P 500.  (Note: due to how these are structured, they are only suitable for very short term investments) You can also consider using Put options for the various indices as well.  For example, you could buy a Put for the SPY out a year or so to give you some fairly cheap insurance (assuming it's a small part of your portfolio). One other option is to invest against the market volatility.  As the market makes sudden swings, the volatility goes up; this tends to be true more when it falls than when it rises.  One way of invesing in market volatility is to trade options against the VIX.
"The difference is in the interrelation between the varied investments you make. Hedging is about specifically offsetting a possible loss in an investment by making another related investment that will increase in value for the same reasons that the original investment would lose value. Gold, for instance, is often regarded as the ultimate hedge. Its value is typically inversely correlated to the rest of the market as a whole, because its status as a material, durable store of value makes it a preferred ""safe haven"" to move money into in times of economic downturn, when stock prices, bond yields and similar investments are losing value. That specific behavior makes investing in gold alongside stocks and bonds a ""hedge""; the increase in value of gold as stock prices and bond yields fall limits losses in those other areas. Investment of cash in gold is also specifically a hedge against currency inflation; paper money, account balances, and even debt instruments like bonds and CDs can lose real value over time in a ""hot"" economy where there's more money than things to buy with it. By keeping a store of value in something other than currency, the price of that good will rise as the currencies used to buy it decrease in real value, maintaining your level of real wealth. Other hedges are more localized. One might, for example, trade oil futures as a hedge on a position in transportation stocks; when oil prices rise, trucking and airline companies suffer in the short term as their margins get squeezed due to fuel costs. Currency futures are another popular hedge; a company in international business will often trade options on the currencies of the companies it does business in, to limit the ""jitters"" seen in the FOREX spot market caused by speculation and other transient changes in market demand. Diversification, by contrast, is about choosing multiple unrelated investments, the idea being to limit losses due to a localized change in the market. Companies' stocks gain and lose value every day, and those companies can also go out of business without bringing the entire economy to its knees. By spreading your wealth among investments in multiple industries and companies of various sizes and global locations, you insulate yourself against the risk that any one of them will fail.  If, tomorrow, Kroger grocery stores went bankrupt and shuttered all its stores, people in the regions it serves might be inconvenienced, but the market as a whole will move on. You, however, would have lost everything if you'd bet your retirement on that one stock. Nobody does that in the real world; instead, you put some of your money in Kroger, some in Microsoft, some in Home Depot, some in ALCOA, some in PG&E, etc etc. By investing in stocks that would be more or less unaffected by a downturn in another, if Kroger went bankrupt tomorrow you would still have, say, 95% of your investment next egg still alive, well and continuing to pay you dividends. The flip side is that if tomorrow, Kroger announced an exclusive deal with the Girl Scouts to sell their cookies, making them the only place in the country you can get them, you would miss out on the full possible amount of gains you'd get from the price spike if you had bet everything on Kroger.  Hindsight's always 20/20; I could have spent some beer money to buy Bitcoins when they were changing hands for pennies apiece, and I'd be a multi-millionaire right now. You can't think that way when investing, because it's ""survivor bias""; you see the successes topping the index charts, not the failures. You could just as easily have invested in any of the hundreds of Internet startups that don't last a year." You might want to just keep it in cash. For one step further you could do an even split of USD, EUR and silver. USD hedges against loss of value in the euro, precious metal hedges against a global financial problem. Silver over gold because of high gold:silver ratio is high. You could lose money this way. There are some bad things that can happen that will make your portfolio fall, but there are also many bad things that can happen that would result in no change or gain. With careful trades in stocks and even more aggressive assets, you could conceivably see large returns. But since you're novice, you won't be able to make these trades, and you'll just lose your investment. Ordinarily, novices can buy an S&P ETF and enjoy decent return (7-8% annual on average) at reasonable risk, but that only works if you stay invested for many years. In the short term, S&P can crash pretty badly, and stay low for a year or more. If you can just wait it out, great (it has always recovered eventually), but if some emergency forces you to take the money out you'd have to do so at a big loss. Lately, the index has shown signs of being overvalued. If you buy it now, you could luck out and be 10-15% up in a year, but you could also end up 30% down - not a very favorable risk/reward rate. Which is why I would hold on to my cash until it does crash (or failing that, starts looking more robust again) and then think about investing. "There is no rule-of-thumb that fits every person and every situation.  However, the reasons why this advice is generally applicable to most people are simple. Why it is good to be more aggressive when you are young The stock market has historically gone up, on average, over the long term.  However, on its way up, it has ups and downs.  If you won't need your investment returns for many years to come, you can afford to put a large portion of your investment into the volatile stock market, because you have plenty of time for the market to recover from temporary downturns. Why it is good to be more conservative when you are older Over a short-term period, there is no certainty that the stock market will go up.  When you are in retirement, most people withdraw/sell their investments for income.  (And once you reach a certain age, you are required to withdraw some of your retirement savings.)  If the market is in a temporary downturn, you would be forced to ""sell low,"" losing a significant portion of your investment.   Exceptions Of course, there are exceptions to these guidelines.  If you are a young person who can't help but watch your investments closely and gets depressed when seeing the value go down during a market downturn, perhaps you should move some of your investment out of stocks.  It will cost you money in the long term, but may help you sleep at night. If you are retired, but have more saved than you could possibly need, you can afford to risk more in the stock market.  On average, you'll come out ahead, and if a downturn happens when you need to sell, it won't affect your overall situation much." Is that really true though?  He brought in via hedge fund when the stock was multiples more in 2004.  He loaned it a bunch of money, many billions.  He gets the Sears commerial real estate via Seritage but anyone who seen commercial real estate lately knows the market is flooded with excess square footage, retail is being stomped in general, and that Sears/Kmart strip malls in many cases aren't the prime areas anymore.  I can see him making out better than the average Stockholder who keeps on holding onto it but nowhere near recuperating his investment.  In fact, the average guy could and would have dropped it long ago with an simple website login, these big investors don't have that luxury of dumping stock on a whim so they go down with the ship.  http://fortune.com/2017/03/31/sears-eddie-lampert-net-worth-hedge-fund/ In the United States, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation protects the first $500,000 you have at a brokerage including up to $250,000 in cash. This means that if the firm holding your securities fails financially, you have some coverage. That insurance does not prevent your investment itself from losing money. Even traditionally save money market funds can potentially lose value in a situation called Breaking the buck. This means that the Net Asset Value of the fund falls below $1/share. Alas, during periods of market calamity, even traditionally safe stores of value are subject to increased risk. "Your strategy fails to control risk. Your ""inversed crash"" is called a rally. And These kind of things often turn into bigger rallies because of short squeezes, when all the people that are shorting a stock are forced to close their stock because of margin calls - its not that shorts ""scramble"" to close their position, the broker AUTOMATICALLY closes your short positions with market orders and you are stuck with the loss. So no, your ""trick"" is not enough. There are better ways to profit from a bearish outlook." "My question to you would be ""When is the market down?"" I know that a lot of people attempt to do this and never get close.   With 40 years left to retirement, I would have you consider to just invest in the manner that you are most comfortable and let dollar cost averaging do the rest." Your question reminds me of a Will Rogers quote: buy some good stock, and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it. There's no way to prevent yourself from buying a stock that goes down.  In fact all stocks go down at some times.  The way to protect your long term investment is to diversify, which increases the chances that you have more stocks that go up than go down.  So many advisors will encourage index funds, which have a low cost (which eats away at returns) and low rick (because of diversification).  If you want to experiment with your criteria that's great, and I wish you luck, but  Note that historically, very few managed funds (meaning funds that actively buy and sell stocks based on some set of criteria) outperform the market over long periods.  So don't be afraid of some of your stocks losing - if you diversify enough, then statistically you should have more winners than losers. It's like playing blackjack.  The goal is not to win every hand. The goal is to have more winning hands than losing hands.