With the economy going to hell in a hand basket, you might think it would be easy to make a bundle shorting the shares of some stock that's getting there fast. We thought this ourselves about MGM Mirage, a savvy casino operator that has bet the ranch on boom times in Las Vegas ' and not just boom times now, but more or less forever. But the chart below shows why, even when one is wagering on a sure thing, the path to easy profits can be strewn with banana peels, ball bearings and dog poop. We encountered all three attempting to short MGM with put options in early November. The stock had just slipped below $90 after hitting an all-time high near $110 a couple of weeks earlier, and we were eager to get on board before it really started to fall apart. The trading idea came to us during a four-night stay at the Borgata last summer, when we were in town for a reunion of Atlantic City High School's Class of 1967. The place was impressive, to say the least, but that was its problem. There were more night clubs and super-pricey restaurants in the hotel than had existed in all of Atlantic City when the first casino opened there 30 years ago. If the economy were to nosedive, a prospect that we viewed even last summer as a certainty, whence would come the customers to fill Borgata's endless rows of gaming tables, the Spa Taccore, and no fewer than 13 'destination' restaurants where $100 won't even cover the tip, much less the tab? 30-Somethings And there was something else that caught our eye: It was mostly 30-Somethings who had packed the place. Everywhere you looked, they were queuing to cough up C-notes as though it were
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