Yes, you can point to a few cases like ICPT out of thousands where a short would have been very costly indeed. But mostly that speaks to diversification, which applies on the short side just as much as on the long. There are a whole lot more examples where the reverse has happened and a stock at $15 winds up suddenly at $2.
If you confine your shorts to stocks with decent market caps (say over a billion or two) then the chances of anything like ICPT happening are minuscule. Worst case is likely a merger announcement where you are out 30% or so.
Shorting a stock like Intel (as I have done intermittently over the last few years) is no more or less risky than being long.
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