I also have puts. The cost to get into puts it extremely expensive, I am going to have to pay 125% of my gains into premiums to get any decent downside protection for my main assets. That can easily go to 0 and came close when we had that spike on Friday. Shorting index funds is far less risky. Has any index every set off the tripwire for an upward swing? If spy wasn’t hard to borrow, Id be exclusively shorting. Want to see crazy premiums look at puts on the JNK etf.
Puts are insanely expensive now with the current IV. If you're just protecting a portfolio without selling, shorting SPY is fine if you have offsets in your stocks.