Better than a true “short” is to buy a put option on the stock for 100 shares. You buy a contract that lets you buy someone else shares at a lower price. If youre sure the stock is going to decrease, you pay a minor amount to make more money when it does.
You can then opt to exercise this and get cheap shares, or more likely, sell the put contract directly for profit.
You can also sell a call option that says you will provide 100 shares at a higher price. If you think the stock is going down, you will never have to actually fulfill this, so the money you made from selling the call is pure profit.
The positive with options is that they limit your losses if youre wrong, unlike shorting where technically your losses can be unlimited. Options are also easier to get into than shorts, which generally require specific brokers that have minimum account size.
The negative is that options are time limited. They last only a certain amount of time you specify when you buy. You can be 100% right about how the market will move, but if you get the timing wrong, you still lose money