The improbable success of The Big Short, a scathing and hilarious tutorial on making money during a financial crisis, probably has a lot of people thinking that now might be a good time to start betting against the current bubble(s).

That's a well-timed thought because it comes after three long years in which shorting was really, really hard. Why was it hard? Because easy money — at first — floats all boats. When interest rates are low and financing is readily available, even the crappiest companies can pay their bond interest and support their share price with debt-fueled share repurchases. The uniformity of the past few years' bull market was so extreme that buying the most heavily-shorted stocks — on the assumption that those companies would have access to sufficient capital to support their market value, thus forcing the shorts to cover at ever-higher prices — was a successful and widely-practiced strategy.

Long-suffering short sellers, as a result, now find themselves in a target-rich environment reminiscent of The Big Short's final act. Dallas-based Bearing Fund is a case in point. After a “humbling” couple of years, partners Bill Laggner and Kevin Duffy have ridden some high-profile short positions (including SunEdision, Wynn Resorts and Valeant

DollarCollapse: The past few years have been tough for short sellers. But during 2015 that changed in a big way. What happened?