Believe me, there are many trades where I wish I would have gone long instead of short or short instead of long… many. Nobody bats .1000 in trading, not even remotely close. That is why I continually preach the benefits of diversifying one’s trades, not only by going long the most objective bullish stocks or sectors setups & shorting the most bearish but also diversifying one’s trades among various sectors and asset classes.
In recent months I’ve shared (and personally traded) plenty of long trade ideas, both official & unofficial in solar stocks, marijuana stocks, gold miners, commodities & miscellaneous stocks, including a semiconductor (QCOM) all while being short the semiconductor sector & other stocks/sectors.
The stock market (S&P 500, $DJIA, Russell 2000, etc…) has gone nowhere for months now, topping out & trading sideways. That means while some sectors (primarily tech) has continued to rise, many others have been moving lower, creating trading opps on both the long & short side. Picking just a couple of trades or sectors can be very profitable if correct but also sharply increases the risk & amount of loss in your portfolio if wrong compared to a more diversified portfolio of both long & short trades spread among various stocks, sectors and or asset classes (stocks, bonds, commodities, precious metals, currencies, etc…).

I understand your frustration, especially with the tech oriented shorts. I have given up some time ago on shorting the indices directly and looked for good opportunities in sectors. I took the SOXX short trade because to me (as to Randy) it had a compelling risk/reward ratio. The upside seemed limited compared to potential gains to the downside.
Unfortunately it didn’t pan out to what the technical were suggesting, but that discourage me from trying to short other sectors. I am short crude now, for a swing trade, because on my chart, it is back testing the up trend line it broke through on May 2 (chart in a post above), plus it has the 50 and 200 DMAs to contend with at 49.4. I will stop out at 50 if it doesn’t work out.
The point is don’t dismiss all trades because some of them didn’t work out. This GDX trade has a high probability of playing out.