Can beginners not start with selling?

Stocks are something you buy—.

This is the image many people have.

Indeed, that’s correct. Companies that go public exist to expand their business and pursue profits, and to return a portion of that to shareholders. In a mature modern society, there is a clear expectation not only to profit but also to take responsibility for products, employees, and the communities in which they operate. If you simply think in terms of money, you can calculate a “positive” scenario where profits are generated, accumulated, and returned to shareholders, allowing the company to grow itself.

It’s a simple, easy-to-understand way of thinking.

However, from another perspective, a different idea can also be valid.

First, let’s observe price movements in a straightforward way.

Even if a company shows long-term growth and a long upward trend, if we define the investment horizon of typical individual investors as short (a few weeks) or long (up to several months or years), we can at best describe it as “going up and down.”

Then, discarding the idea of corporate growth, you arrive at the conclusion that you can use a buying strategy that aims to buy when prices go up or down, or even short selling to profit from a decline. Using price movements to generate profit, short selling is not something special or unusual.

Many people view stock trading as “spending money to buy something new,” but that makes it blend with ordinary consumer behavior. Therefore they deny short selling with the idea that “selling something you don’t own is odd.”

When you buy clothes, you expect to use them and eventually discard them.

Selling them would fetch only a small amount.

However, stocks are not such consumer goods.

By holding them, you can expect profits in dividends or price appreciation. New clothes begin to lose value the moment you own them, but with stocks, you don’t experience such depreciation; you don’t buy to use and discard them.

Stocks are a mechanism that connects capital providers (investors) with capital receivers (companies). Buying stocks is simply about “putting cash to work to grow your funds,” whether the aim is capital gains or dividends.

To smooth such capital flows, markets provide the function of short selling. Using it to make profits is recognized as a perfectly ordinary transaction.

Even in ordinary commerce, there are many cases where “sales come first.”

A car dealer sells a car to a customer (signs a contract) and then places an order with the manufacturer.

As for airplanes, orders are already taken from airlines during the design stage.

To assume that “starting with selling is special” in trading such as trades would be a reflection of a distorted information structure in society or the market industry rather than an intrinsic truth.

If you don’t position “to increase funds” as “to own and hold,” and avoid pointing out the parts where consumer behavior is confused with investing, it becomes easier for operators. And they tend to broadcast only information about what to buy to be advantageous, and investors simply take it at face value, or rather, accept it naively.

This leads to the discovery that investment information should be measured by one’s own standards.

Now, from another angle, a case can be made that “short selling is easier for beginners.” When trying to explain price movements logically, that answer emerges.

There is no absolute standard to measure stock prices.

Beyond common indicators like PER (price-earnings ratio) and PBR (price-to-book value), there is no theory that can definitively explain stock prices. Growth, future prospects, and current corporate value all form foundations, but a large part is determined by the market’s popularity—something hazy. Otherwise, prices would not fluctuate by 20–30% in a single day due to hits to or hits to the limit.

When focusing on this element of “popularity” in considering price movements, you can explain that when popularity wanes, the company’s value approaches its liquidation value, and when popularity rises, the value rises regardless of fundamentals.

And many practitioners’ belief—“it may sit at a low price for a while, but markets that rise do not stay high forever (they will crash)”—leads to this idea.

It’s common to see prices bought when cheap but then not rise... such things happen a lot.

Yet markets that have risen always fall, so riding the decline with short selling is, in a sense, a sensible and straightforward method.

In high price ranges, where popularity is high, entries are difficult, but if you build a short position and ride the downward wave, the rest becomes easy—this is the sense many practitioners share.

・Stock price rises when you lift things against gravity

・A bear market naturally falls due to gravity when there is no artificial force

That is the way it’s viewed.

In Lin Investment Laboratory’s current focus, the “Chugen-sen Ketsu-gyo Method” does not use terms like “increase” or “decrease” at all. The starting point is to judge strength or weakness by a solid standard, and then interpret that outlook as either “forward” (in line) or “reverse” (against the forecast) to practically think about the next move.

I’ve made things a bit messy, so let me sum up.

Dismissing short selling as something special narrows one’s vision.

However, whether something should be bought or sold depends on the player’s mindset.

A viewpoint that treats both rising and rising levels equally, as with the Chugen lines, is the most plain and agreeable stance regardless of trading philosophy.