Rebalancing using short ETFs?

[Cortopassi]

I just had a thought pop into my head, and haven't tried yet to determine if it would be beneficial or not.

My actual %'s vs. target percentages are skewed like this, and I assume all are the same:
--Bonds and gold are high
--Stocks are low.
--Let's leave cash out for now.

Normally, if you were to rebalance, you'd sell bonds and gold and buy stocks.

Would it make any difference to instead buy a short bond ETF and a short gold ETF to balance things out? I can't wrap my brain around this. Maybe this, coupled with a more aggressive rebalancing, like once a month? Could that squeeze out profit in both directions?

[pmward]

The short ETF's have time decay to them. The cost of carry would make it not worth it.

[Cortopassi]

Ahh, I knew the leveraged ones did, but didn’t know 1x ones did as well.

[Mark Leavy]

I had considered actually shorting GLD (not a short ETF) to rebalance out of physical gold in lieu of selling some coins. The thought was that when it came time to "buy" more gold, I would just close my GLD short.

I never ended up doing it, and just sold some coins, as I don't like complicating things too much. Also, I wasn't actively using the broker I usually use for things like shorts and options and I didn't want to bother moving the funds etc that I would need to make a short viable.