Protect your paper millions

Mark Cuban used a similar stragety after Broadcast.com was bought by Yahoo! to protect against a downturn in the stock market:

"The basic worry that comes with having lots of money is no different from what worries everyone else. Whether you've got $100 or $100 million, you don't want to lose it. After we sold Broadcast.com, I hedged my stock with synthetic indexes, in case the market cratered in the six months before I could hedge my actual Yahoo shares. It cost me $20 million, but it protected what I had. Todd Wagner and I had a credo: "Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered.""

Note: Obviously meet with a financial advisor if any of this actually applies to you.