<<Amusingly/similarly, almost no one buys insurance without owning the underlying asset. The only exception I can think of is related to all the idiots that bought insurance on MBS that they didn't own (and didn't that turn out well?). >>
You forgot the little smiley face. The idiots such as such as Steve Eisman and Dr. Michael Burry, all described in Michael Lewis's book "THe Big Short", and of course John Paulson, who BOUGHT credit default swaps as a way of shorting the subprime market, made hundreds of millions (billions in the case of Paulson). The idiots who wrote it, well, perhaps not so well.
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