I assume only that you short a reasonable amount of deep ITM calls (I'd go with $10). Assuming you put this as an "investment". Do you think it's guaranteed you'll be profitable in 4 years? (yes I know there probably isn't a 4 year expiration contract, but you can always roll every week duh) If not from the bull market then from the index decaying. We've seen some pretty bad spikes that killed people last Feb and Oct. But if you can survive that, the thing will decay to nothing in a few years.
I’ve seen people doing this in volatility FB group and pretty much all blew up last February, even on paper accounts when they were testing various strats. The whole volatility discussion group with several “experts” went quiet after February 2018. So the answer is: no. First, last year might’ve been mild comparing to a real recession/crisis where UVXY could blow up 10x (1000%). Therefore even if you allocate only 10% to shorting UVXY, you could end up with 100% drawdown, meaning your account would be gone. While even a 300% blow up would be painful and could also result in liquidated account due to UVXY not being marginable. Secondly, if you go “too deep” ITM, especially on weeklies, you’ll get assigned short shares very often since market making computers will calculate more value for them in exercising their options, especially when short borrow rates increase. Sometimes they’ll do this even a little after hours when UVXY blows up, so you’ll wake up holding short shares the next morning and paying 0.4%+/day for borrowing them, including the night of assignment. Selling 1-2 year calls also carries assignment risk, while selling such calls may not be much different than shorting shares while moving slower and not allowing you to get in/out easily due to huge bid/ask spreads. Lastly, when UVXY does go up, let’s say 50% just on a SPX pullback, you’ll end up being assigned short shares at the price prior to the blow up, so that for example when UVXY goes from $30 to $45 you’ll end up being short shares at $30, while everyone else will be shorting at $45. And you’ll be stuck waiting for the UVXY to come back down to $30 before you can even break even and continue your strategy, in the meantime also paying short borrow fees. When volatility blew up last Feb 2018, it took a year for UVXY to come back down to where it was before then. So you’d be holding short shares for a year, waiting just to break even while carrying large drawdowns and margin. During a recession you may end up being negative for 2-3 years. Generally best strategies for UVXY may be based on trading shares directly, preferably long/short (that’s my current focus). Seth Golden (https://twitter.com/SethCL) is just shorting them and his accuracy is over 95% - he is able to scalp it almost daily, while also knowing when to stop trading and move to cash. Options wise, https://twitter.com/michaellistman has a pretty decent but still risky strategy of buying UVXY put spreads 2-months out on every UVXY spike over 10%. But last year many people also blew their accounts following him, while he himself got suspiciously quiet last year, so that’s risky too. The only guy I’ve seen hugely successful and turning $30k into $millions (besides Seth) was day trading VIX options, with one time making $300k in a week selling the $300l worth of weekly VIX puts.
I would be very hard pressed to come up with a worst trading strategy than to ever short calls on UVXY.