If these people play short and do the"safe shorts", they have not really lost, they missed some nice runs, but they did not miss much sleep. One does not always get market conditions that are safe to play long when both valuation (in the smaller stocks) and excess optimism (in the market in general) are present. My approach has not changed, preservation of capital is still paramount, and being loaded through a Dow drop of 400 or so point could be very painful. I don't know if we get it here, but I suspect that in the next few weeks we could. Just don't short snorters and have tight stops if you decide to play the dark side. I have stated time and again that playing the dark side is dangerous and thus provided a list for those insisting on playing the dark side for safer short plays. I think that even here, of those, EK, KO and , JNJ are actually green, and the red on IBM and MRK is minimal.