Here are my thoughts, take them for what you will.
Determine what timeframe you are investing for. Are you looking to make short term trades or hold for months? The ideal risk/reward entry points into shorting financials and builders has passed, but trading can be profitable, though you will have to accept more risk, volatility, etc.
As someone mentioned above, preserving capital is very important. Use predetermined loss points and stick to them, and use trailing stops to (hopefully) let your profits run & lock in gains.
Large drawdowns can cripple your portfolio. Leverage and volatile investments magnify this affect. Large losses are also exponentially harder to recover from:
10% loss requires a subsequent 11% gain
20% -> 25%
30% -> 43%
40% -> 67%
50% -> 100%
SRS, SKF, & SCC are all ultra bear funds, which means they are internally leveraged (using derivatives to attempt to perform 2x the inverse of the underlying). These can be excellent tools if used appropriately, but placing too large of a chunk of your portfolio into these is risky. Even though they are “diversified” in that they track an index, they are considerably more volatile than broad-based ETF’s that track large sections of the market (e.g. SPY). Be prepared for large gaps overnight.
As has been noted before, financials and builders may have more room to slide but aren’t ideal for non-traders at this point.
The next sector to potentially take a hit is the consumers, and I agree with the poster above that it is still relatively early on these. SCC trades very thinly, so I would avoid that for now.
If we assume that the housing mess coupled with the inability to extract equity will cause consumers to tighten up, which consumer stocks are the most vulnerable? I would stay away from the value side, such as the Walmart’s & Costco’s and would focus on the “faux-luxury” stocks like COH, TIF, NORD, GES, etc.
