How to make money from a downward European market?
If you want to make money while European equities markets are crashing and the Euro itself is devaluing: None of these strategies are to be taken lightly. All involve risk. There are probably numerous ways that you can lose even though it seems like you should win. Transaction fees could eat your profits, especially if you have only a small amount of capital to invest with. The worst part is that they all involve timing. If you think the crash is coming next week, you could, say, buy a bunch of puts. But if the crash doesn't come for another 6 months, all of your puts are going to expire worthless and you've lost all of your capital. Even worse, if you sell short an index ETF this week in advance of next week's impending crash, and some rescue package arrives over the weekend, equity prices could spike at the beginning of the week and you'd be screwed. Not a day goes by that someone isn't forecasting a collapse or meteoric rise. Have you read Ravi Batra's The Great Depression of 1990? The '90s went on to return an amazing 18.3%/yr compound growth rate for the decade. (The book sells for just over $3 with free Amazon shipping.) In 1987, Elaine Garzarelli predicted the crash. But went years after to produce unremarkable results. Me? I saw that 1987 was up 5% or so year on year (in hindsight , of course), and by just staying invested, I added deposits throughout the year, and saw that 5% return. What crash? Looking back now, it was a tiny blip. You need to be diversified in a way that one segment of the market falling won't ruin you. If you think the world is ending, you should make peace with your loved ones and your God, no investment advice will be of any value. (Nor will gold for that matter.) What you do is you create an infomercial where you sell a booklet about junk investments that you are absolutely certian may survive an end of the world scenerio.  Then you sell that booklet to people who fear for their family.  It is basically a tax on stupidity but works because it prays on the fears of the stupid.  It requires moral bankruptcy, but you can end up with quite a bit of money... of course if the Euro does crash then you have a lot of worthless money. Invest in solid companies, not in esoteric products built on sand. The problem is with finance, not with real economy: oil companies make money, mobile phone companies make money, airlines make money... Trying to make money on something going down is inherently more complicated, risky and speculative than making money on it going up.  Selling short allows for unlimited losses.  Put options expire and have to be rebought if you want to keep playing that game.  If you are that confident that the European market will completely crash (I'm not, but then again, I tend to be fairly contrarian) I'd recommend just sitting it out in cash (possibly something other than the Euro) and waiting until it gets so ridiculously cheap due to panic selling that it defies all common sense.  For example, when companies that aren't completely falling apart are selling for less than book value and/or less than five times prior peak earnings that's a good sign.  Another indicator is when you hear absolutely nothing other than doom-and-gloom and people swearing they'll never buy another stock as long as they live.  Then buy at these depressed prices and when all the panic sellers realize that the world didn't end, it will go back up. If you are interested in short term trading and live in the UK you can do some Spread Betting. If you know what you are doing you can make money no matter which way the market is moving. Note that most people don't know what they are doing and lose their money pretty quickly. The best way to make money on a downward market is to buy at the bottom, sell at the top.  Lather, rinse, repeat.
"Since these indices only try to follow VIX and don't have the underlying constituents (as the constituents don't really exist in most meaningful senses) they will always deviate from the exact numbers but should follow the general pattern. You're right, however, in stating that the graphs that you have presented are substantially different and look like the indices other than VIX are always decreasing. The problem with this analysis is that the basis of your graphs is different; they all start at different dates... We can fix this by putting them all on the same graph:  this shows that the funds did broadly follow VIX over the period (5 years) and this also encompasses a time when some of the funds started. The funds do decline faster than VIX from the beginning of 2012 onward and I had a theory for why so I grabbed a graph for that period. My theory was that, since volatility had fallen massively after the throes of the financial crisis there was less money to be made from betting on (investing in?) volatility and so the assets invested in the funds had fallen making them smaller in comparison to their 2011-2012 basis.  Here we see that the funds are again closely following VIX until the beginning of 2016 where they again diverged lower as volatility fell, probably again as a result of withdrawals of capital as VIX returns fell. A tighter graph may show this again as the gap seems to be narrowing as people look to bet on volatility due to recent events. So... if the funds are basically following VIX, why has VIX been falling consistently over this time? Increased certainty in the markets and a return to growth (or at least lower negative growth) in most economies, particularly western economies where the majority of market investment occurs, and a reduction in the risk of European countries defaulting, particularly Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain; the ""PIGS"" countries has resulted in lower volatility and a return to normal(ish) market conditions. In summary the funds are basically following VIX but their values are based on their underlying capital. This underlying capital has been falling as returns on volatility have been falling resulting in their diverging from VIX whilst broadly following it on the new basis." "Other than the inconvienent fact that Treasury cannot sell to the Fed by law your theory is nice. You forget the step where the open market buys from the Treasury since they desire bonds to invest in, and the Fed can buy only from the open market.  Secondly, the Fed does not give cash to the Treasury. The mint (a branch of the Treasury, not the Fed) prints cash.  So it seems your understanding of how the money system works is quite wrong, yet since this is the Economy subreddit instead of the Economics subreddit, I expect you to get upvotes for saying what is popular even though it is laughably incorrect.  You seem to not like cash that was not ""even existing previously"". All cash was not existing previously. How do you expect people to make transactions? Barter?  You call them interest free loans (but above claimed they will never be paid back?), but then the Fed is making a profit on them? It seems you contradict yourself with all that handwaving.  It would be interesting for you to explain how (and why) money (not cash) gets added and removed to the economy.   Yay for ignorance!" "Your best shot in terms of credit card ""compatibility"" would probably be a very large private European Bank, like Deutsche Bank, HSCB or the like issueing a MasterCard. In England it is quite difficult to get an account without being a resident, but I think HSBC offers a so called ""Passport"" account to non-residents with all the usual cards and benefits, even overdraft, but it's probably expensive.   I think you underestimate how heterogeneous the banking world in Europe is. There are plenty of different local systems in each country. France has it's custom CB system and Germany has a system called GiroPay and a cashless system called GeldKarte (which no one really uses). Even if you have a Mastercard or Visa with pin from a European bank, there is no guarantee that it'll work everywhere reliably. I remember my German housemate having loads of trouble with his amazon.de Mastercard in England. In addition, you will most likely be charged for paying with your CC and ATM/Cashpoint withdrawals in any other country. Fees can range up to 3% for a transaction. So ideally you profile which European country you travel to the most and set up the account there. You should also look for cooperations between certain European banks. I remember Barclays and Deutsche Bank cooperating. On a side note: I'm still amazed by how backwards some banking systems are, e.g. the English. I've been using secure (pin/tan) online-banking in Germany for over 10 years. Transfers are quick, international transfers are free, as long as they are in Euro etc. Everything runs pretty smooth. Not so in England, you need to confirm online transactions over the phone (wtf?) and your only security is a pin and memorable information. Inter-bank transfers, if not set up online, cost up to 30 pounds, even though I could just go to the other bank, draw the cash there and pay it in to the account for free. International transfers start at 20 quid etc.   I could hardly imagine, living in a cheque reliant system like the states anymore." I have some more inputs to investigate: India has dual tax avoidance treaty signed with european countries so that NRIs dont pay tax in both countries. Please check if India has some agreement with Swiss Also for freelance job that is delivered from India, u need to make sure where you have to pay taxes as you are still in India so the term NRI will not hold good here. Also, if Swiss company is paying tax there, and you are  a freelancer from India(resident in india) how to tax filing /rate etc has to be investigated. Also, can you apply for tax back from swiss( a portion of tax paid can be refunded eg: in Germany) but I dont know if this is true for Freelancers and also for people out side SWISS. Bip "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." It's actually quite simple. You're actually confusing two concept. Which are taking a short position and short selling itself. Basically when taking a short position is by believing that the stock is going to drop and you sell it. You can or not buy it back later depending on the believe it grows again or not. So basically you didn't make any profit with the drop in the price's value but you didn't lose money either.  Ok but what if you believe the market or specific company is going to drop and you want to profit on it while it's dropping. You can't do this by buying stock because you would be going long right? So back to the basics. To obtain any type of profit I need to buy low and sell high, right? This is natural for use in long positions. Well, now knowing that you can sell high at the current moment and buy low in the future what do you do? You can't sell what you don't have. So acquire it. Ask someone to lend it to you for some time and sell it. So selling high, check.  Now buying low? You promised the person you would return him his stock, as it's intangible he won't even notice it's a different unit, so you buy low and return the lender his stock. Thus you bought low and sold high, meaning having a profit. So technically short selling is a type of short position. If you have multiple portfolios and lend yourself (i.e. maintaining a long-term long position while making some money with a short term short-term strategy) you're actually short selling with your own stock. This happens often in hedge funds where multiple strategies are used and to optimise the transaction costs and borrowing fees, they have algorithms that clear (match) long and short coming in from different traders, algorithms, etc. Keep in mind that you while have a opportunities risk associated.  So basically, yes, you need to always 'borrow' a product to be able to short sell it. What can happen is that you lend yourself but this only makes sense if: The day trader in the article was engaging in short selling.  Short selling is a technique used to profit when a stock goes down.  The investor borrows shares of a stock from someone else and sells them.  After the stock price goes down, the investor buys the shares back and returns them, pocketing the difference. As the day trader in the article found out, it is a dangerous practice, because there is no limit to the amount of money you can lose. The stock was trading at $2, and the day trader thought the stock was going to go down to $1.  He borrowed and sold 8,400 shares at $2.  He hoped to buy them back at $1 and earn $8,400 profit.  Instead, the stock went up a lot, and he was forced to buy back the shares at $18.50 per share, or about $155,400.  He had had $37,000 with E-Trade, which they took, and he is now over $100,000 in debt. You will likely need to open an account in another EU country, like a broker operating out of France, Britain or Germany, to get the best options.  If you are comfortable using an english language site and interface, I highly recommend Interactive Brokers as they let you trade in many markets simultaneously, have simple currency conversion, and great tools.  But, they are geared toward active traders so you might be better with a more retail oriented broker if you are new to trading stocks. There are many options.  Here is a list to start with: