All this to say... shorting 1-2 years early doesn't work. You don't have the patience or capital to actually maintain a short position for two years while the market goes from 1750 to 4800. You can cheaply sit out in cash, if you want, but that's not a short position. And the S&P500 hasn't seen the kind of 300% run-up over an 18 month period that Nasdaq did in the dotcom boom.

If you want to sell all your tech stocks because you think that it's irrational then take your neutral position. You won't profit from stonks going up but you won't get anything from them going down either. You've isolated yourself from them.

What the quote is advising against isn't neutral positions or pulling out early during an upturn. It's about trying to time downturns.

If you want to profit from a stock going down, you need to hold inverses like shorts or selling call options / buying puts. These inverses are always short term positions, there is no such thing as a cheap long term asset that profits when stocks go down.

Basically if you want to profit from a predicted downturns, becuase you think some asset is irrationally overvalued, then you don't just need to be right, you need to be right and time it. Because it doesn't take long before you go bankrupt holding these sorts of inverses. Aka market stays irrational longer than you can solvently hold these risky positions.

The 17 year recovery time literally has nothing to do with this btw. It's all about short term.

For global currency risk (meaning on USD), You will have to hedge your shorts with a non currency long position which historically hold value during defaults/ runs etc. Assets like gold (ETFs/Gold bars) or real estate (REITs or physical land holdings) or rights to commodity revenue like oil, copper etc [1].

If the currency risk is not for USD, then mix of other currencies particularly USD would work well as as hedge.

Currency risk is independent of shorting, i.e. it is risk in Long positions as well, current may inflate faster than your position increases in value etc.

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[1] Commodity come with additional shorter term market volatility and risks - due their own supply/demand volatility and depend performance of economy.

However after assets like Gold, they will have highest correlation of returns against inflation as long the economy doesn't completely crash, because the demand for them is foundational

eg: If you think NVDA is overvalued relative to the overall tech sector, you could short NVDA, go long QQQ.

And if you have a more opinionated trade in the same currency, eg: you think AAPL will be fine if the AI trade pops, you can do short NVDA, long AAPL.

Finally, an even more advanced version would be to go long on something else in the same sector, but which is less overvalued in your opinion. eg: Short ORCL, long NVDA.