Shorts Will Be Poison for a While

This column was originally published on RealMoney on Nov. 18 at 9:36 a.m. EST. It's being republished as a bonus for TheStreet.com readers.

You don't know the pressure, unless you've been there. You're running a hedge fund, a darned good one, not like those lying or underperforming rascals you keep reading about in the The Wall Street Journal, where every hedge fund seems to be created equal in deviousness and stupidity, except if it is related to George Soros.

That means you are up maybe 8%-12%, and you are thinking, coming into November, "Maybe I'll just lock down, maybe I'll just go to the islands for the next two months because I am beating everyone."

Of course, you are beating everyone for one reason, and one reason only: You know how to short well. You shorted the financials and the homebuilders into the Fed's shenanigans. You shorted tech until the fourth quarter, the preferred way to do things every year. You bet against big pharma, maybe hedged with big biotech. You bet against the semiconductor equipment bow-wows and you shorted the cell-phone component makers against a decent-sized long in Marvell(MRVL Quote) or Texas Instruments(TXN Quote). You went long Google(GOOG Quote) against a short of Yahoo!(YHOO Quote) or Amazon(AMZN Quote). You may have missed oil on the way up, but you have been short it ever since those big Exxon(XOM Quote) prints that stunk up the joint, and you bet against the integrated oils with a long in the OSX or Schlumberger(SLB Quote) for best-of-breed protection. ...