Betting against private company debt when you sense bankruptcy looming? That's supposed to be the trickiest play in the short-selling playbook. Yet market veterans hint at unconventional methods quietly gaining traction. These approaches blur traditional boundaries—leveraging credit default instruments, distressed debt markets, and less-regulated trading channels. What textbooks call impossible, practitioners are quietly executing. The gap between theory and street-level execution keeps widening, and those plugged into the right networks seem to know something the rest don't.