@Krash
Better than listening to "greens" and avoiding nuclear power altogether, as Biden initially seemed inclined to do!
jbobsully11 wrote:It was cheap ($4.27/share) when I bought it, and I figured there would be some kind of catastrophe in the next few years that would allow me to make an easy profit and feel better about myself while the rest of my portfolio sank like the Titanic. Oh well.
The problem with an all-short position, though, is that unlike a normal ETF, these ETFs aren't really meant for long-term holding: they're meant for active investors who think that that they can time the market and the crash is coming any day now. The reason that it was so cheap is because it started a lot more expensive and the short positions it took (plus its expense ratio) slowly ate away most of its value. You're probably not going to make back remotely what you lost even if the market repeats last March in a few years.
If you want to see some of your assets going up while others go down (which is fundamentally irrational, but I assume you know that); diversify, especially internationally, especially in emerging markets. I've found that my emerging market holdings (about 20% of my current portfolio, though I may aim to lower that to 15%), tend to correlate much less with US markets. I've also found that, unless the US market as a whole is taking a dip, my tech ETFs (which are growth stocks), tend to be up when my bread-and-butter US small cap value is down and vice versa.
Anecdotally, I think the ETF I hold which has had the least correlation with US markets is FM—the iShares Frontier Markets ETF. Given that its performance over the past ten years has been highly volatile while averaging out to very low returns, and given that about half the fund is in countries I'm fairly bearish on long-term (Kuwait, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Bahrain), it's not exactly an asset I'd recommend holding a lot of (I hold it because it's the only way to get exposure to Morocco, Kenya, Romania, and Oman, all of which I'm fairly bullish on, and because I'm hoping iShares will make Kuwait and Vietnam-specific ETFs fairly soon, thereby removing those countries from its index), but if you want a decent chance of a holding that goes up when everything else goes down without throwing your money away, I'd strongly recommend FM over any sort of derivative-based ETF.