In the stock market, long and short refers to whether a deal is launched by selling first or purchasing first. To put it another way, long and short may also be used to indicate whether an investor owns or needs to buy equities. Let’s look at long vs. short positions and how they function in the stock market: If the market is bullish (stock prices in an industry are rising), the trader is inclined to retain a long position. Going short or shorting may seem perplexing since in the real world, we must possess something before we can sell it, but this is not the situation in the stock market.