A generation ago, folks our age would be moving from tennis and stocks to rocking chairs and bonds as time goes by. We’d be reducing our risk and stress level and sliding into a comfortable retirement. Nowadays, baby boomers are still playing sports and still in the stock market.

It’s not that we are not as risk averse as our elders. Rather, we think of ourselves as younger for our age than our parents. Consequently, we expect to live longer and need our money to last.

Investing these days is a quagmire. With the 10-year treasury rate below 3 percent, bonds cannot be expected to compensate for even low inflation. So most boomers are still in the market, trying to keep current with new and old strategies like ETFs, REITs, and short selling.

Short selling for seniors?

It used to be that the only people who were interested in talking about short selling were savvy investors. But recently short selling has moved into the limelight. Everyone has an opinion on this practice of borrowing a stock in order to sell it, in hopes of re-purchasing it when the price drops. For the market in general, the question arises whether short selling is a valuable way to keep stock prices accurate, or whether it is responsible for unfair maligning of companies.

Shorting is basically an indirect way of hedging a bet. Investopedia gives an example of an investor with a holding of large-cap technology stocks, who might short the Nasdaq-100 ETF to hedge his technology exposure. He would make a lot of money if the Nasdaq-100 crashed, but his downside risk is theoretically unlimited. No matter how high the price rises he has to purchase the ETF to repay his lenders.

The activist investor shorts a stock based on whistle-blower accusations. One incident in February 2015 was kicked off by an episode of “60 Minutes” about Lumber Liquidators. The show documented tests showing high formaldehyde levels in their laminates, which the company then lied about. The following day, the stock fell 25 percent. The company ran an emergency public relations campaign, but by April the stock was worth only half of its February value, and in May, with the stock worth one-third of its pre-“60 Minutes” value, the CEO quit.

Of course, a television show isn’t a court of law and activist shorts can unfairly drive down a stock price with false allegations. This is called “short and distort,” and is illegal. Nevertheless, The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki argued that activist shorts are good overall.

“All kinds of forces push stocks higher: investor overconfidence, corporate puffery, and Wall Street’s inherent bullish bias,” he wrote. “Shorting helps counterbalance this, and it contributes to the diversity of opinion that healthy markets require.”

In the past decade, two studies of world markets found that markets where shorting was allowed were more efficient and their prices more accurate.

But is it for seniors?

In my nearly 40 years of investing and fewer years advising, I have never sold short. However, I’ve come to appreciate the benefits of short selling. My advice is to leave short selling to the folks working on their second billion, and cheer them on in their endeavor. The better the information they provide, the better their stocks holdings perform and the better the indexes do. The reduced stress of passive investing just might keep us on the tennis courts a little longer.