It's impossible to answer a question like this, in general. If short-term means "between now and next week", then that's completely different than "between now and the end of the year", etc.

For a short-term bet over the next few months (and, don't confuse yourself, this is nothing more than gambling), you need to pick some set of what-if scenarios and bet on some side of that coming true. Example: betting that Chrysler might declare bankruptcy in the next few months. A very risky bet. To make that bet, you'd normally short their shares except you can't, because they're privately held. Instead, you need to bet on collateral damage to their employees, suppliers (*), and surrounding communities. Alternately, you would bet on their competition benefiting from such a scenario.

(*) It's unclear whether, for many Chrysler suppliers, they would see the termination of contracts with Chrysler as a bad thing, given how Chrysler's been pushing them on contract terms.

Let me just overemphasize, again, that this is big risk-taking territory, and unless you feel you really understand the particular world where you're making your bet (i.e., you think you know more than the rest of the stock market -- good luck on that), then you might as well take your money to Vegas.

A more typical short-term strategy, assuming that you're going to need this money in, say, two years, for a big purchase, but you're not going to need it any time sooner than that, would be to buy something with very low risk, like a money market account. If you knew more about what the big purchase will be in two years, you could take a hedging strategy against price increases. Example: say you know you're buying your wife an expensive piece of gold jewelry for an upcoming anniversary, two years hence. You could buy IAU (an exchange traded fund that tracks the price of gold). If gold goes up in price, you're covered. If gold goes down in price, you lose money, but that's okay because the jewelry you were planning to buy (hopefully) got cheaper as well.