1. Short stocks directly.
Shorting stocks directly through brokers, such as Apple's stock AAPL, first sell the stocks borrowed from brokers, and then buy them back when Apple's stock falls back, and return them to brokers to earn the difference in the middle.
2. Short by buying and selling options corresponding to stocks.
Many companies in the American stock market have corresponding options, such as one month, two months and one year. And there are also differences in prices, including long options and short options. If you have American stocks, you can sell your options to others (similar to "issuing" options yourself). This operation is called "writing". You can directly buy short options (buy put options) and need less funds; Or you can "write" the long option to others after buying the stock. No matter whether the stock goes up or down, as long as you "write" a long option with a target above the current price, you will make money in nine cases out of ten.
3. Buy options corresponding to the index
Standard & Poor's 500 Index, Nasdaq Index, Dow Jones Industrial Average, etc. There are also options in the US stock market. The trading methods of index options and stock options are similar, but individuals can't "write" and can only buy short options (put options) if they want to be short.
4. American short-selling funds
There are many short ETFs in American stock market, such as DXD short Dow Jones index, QID short Nasdaq index, SKF short financial services index and so on. If you don't want to take too much risk, you might as well consider buying short ETFs, which are basically operated by experts and have considerable benefits.
5. Through futures trading
Futures trading and stock market are carried out separately, and investors can also short US stocks through stock index futures, but stock index futures are much less than options, and relatively few investors short US stocks through stock index futures.
What is short selling of US stocks?
When it comes to short selling of US stocks, we have to mention its counterpart-long selling of US stocks. Simply put, long and short are two opposite operation modes in the stock market or futures market. Dragon refers to buying and opening positions when the market is bullish, and then selling and closing positions; Short selling refers to selling and opening positions when the market is bearish, and then buying and closing positions. Both are profitable by earning the difference between before and after.
Specifically, short selling US stocks means borrowing shares from brokers when a US stock is expected to fall, and then buying and repaying brokers when the stock falls. The difference earned is the profit. In this process, it is necessary to pay the interest generated by "borrowing shares" to the brokers, that is, the interest on securities lending. The more investors short a stock, the more expensive its interest rate will be.