What does going long or short mean?
Going long means buying in the expectation that price rises — you profit on the way up. Going short means selling first to profit when price falls: you effectively borrow, sell high, and buy back lower.
Long is intuitive — buy low, sell high. Short is the same trade mirrored: sell high first, buy back low later, keep the difference. Markets fall as often as they rise, so a trader who can only go long has an edge in half the conditions at best.
Shorting carries its own risks — a long position can only fall to zero, but a short position's loss is theoretically unlimited (price can keep rising). That's why shorts pair naturally with stop-losses and why practicing them on virtual money first is the sane order of operations.
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