It’s an interesting thought. The growth is so extreme that if the S&P 500 fell 50% today it would reach levels last seen in 2022. Given that the timespan is so short, I’m honestly not sure it would be as bad for 401ks as people expect unless all of your investment was concentrated in the last 4 years.

I suppose it’s worse if your calculation is, “I’ll retire when my 401k hits $X absolute value,” but I think most people just retire at a certain age instead with risk spread across decades.

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MattGrommes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One of the big issues with this is sequence of returns risk. If you retire and rely on your portfolio but the market dives for a year or two right after you leave the workforce, your total portfolio value is screwed because you were selling at a low point.

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rwmj an hour ago | parent [-]

Which is why you keep 3-5 years of spending money in cash (or a bond ladder if you want to be fancy).

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duzer65657 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

most don't even have 3-5 years "spending money" (whatever that is) in total savings; if you're keeping that in cash you're getting 2-3% annually while the market has doubled.

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MattGrommes 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

When you're headed into retirement, one possibility is to shift to saving more in cash-like options instead of a 401k (or whatever). It's should just be part of your retirement plan to account for possibilities like this.

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rwmj an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, but we're not talking about people who have no savings. FIRE people have huge investment portfolios while being frugal with their spending, and understand the risk of keeping 5-10% of their total net worth in cash equivalents (not dissimilar to having insurance).

	▲	39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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hdgvhicv an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People return with less than 4 years expenses in retirement funds

Surely you need about 20 years?

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bell-cot 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Look back at the grandparent comment. If someone doesn't have 3-5 years in total savings, then they had better not try to retire.

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staticman2 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

3 to 5 years of cash or a bond ladder won't help in a 1970s stagflation scenario.

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Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

During the dot-com crisis. Nasdaq fell around 78% from its peak and S&P by around 49% so it isn't unprecedented (ironically has both aspects of being both tech and are within the same time-era)

It created an actual recession albeit thankfully short one for the case of dotcom (sadly not for 2007) and a really recessionary environment which causes unemployment and just straight up fear and panic.

I do understand what you are talking about and overall in long term, perhaps things flatten out but atleast speaking financially so, its better to be on a smooth sailing road rather than insane ups and downs with retirement money if preferable.

> I think most people just retire at a certain age instead with risk spread across decades.

The issue in my opinion is with people near that certain age you mention and who retire in the time during boom just before bust. They would then get the 50% hit on their savings instantly with an recession/inflation/unemployment environment which in my opinion might be genuinely devastating.

(supposing that they had their investments in stocks, I wouldn't consider that any retiree would have all their money in stocks but there have been some other comments which show a sizable amount, @kipchak's comment shows 50% stock for retirement. so a 50% shock on top of that could lead to a wipe out of 25% of your retirement fund which is honestly still pretty crazy.)

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Karrot_Kream 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This kind of metric is always used to shock and awe in pop media when talking about the GFC, but it's not how actual investment works. In practice most investments are DCAed.

No person puts all of their retirement savings into QQQ or SPY at the peak and sell it off at the trough. Instead folks drip their savings into their weighted portfolio and withdraw money from their weighted portfolio as expenses accrue. Now obviously the GFC was a huge deal, but this sort of facile understanding of stock markets always leads to big misunderstandings. There's a reason Monte Carlo analyses of these events are used to model these scenarios.

(Though I imagine there were many people who tried to re-balance their portfolio into a less equity-heavy model abruptly during the GFC and based on equities performance at the time, it was probably the right move as long as taxes were taken into account.)

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toomuchtodo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> (supposing that they had their investments in stocks, I wouldn't consider that any retiree would have all their money in stocks but there have been some other comments which show a sizable amount, @kipchak's comment shows 50% stock for retirement. so a 50% shock on top of that could lead to a wipe out of 25% of your retirement fund which is honestly still pretty crazy.)

What do you think the cost would be for protective puts per $1M of equity exposure of a portfolio on a monthly basis? "Bubble Insurance" if you will. Going 100% bonds is simply intolerable for the time window for most retirees, but an equity wipeout of this magnitude is equally intolerable.

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matwood an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Even someone close to retirement doesn't need to go 100% bonds. It's not like someone needs all their retirement money on day 1. The part that remains in equities will continue generating dividends that will get reinvested, and recover over time.

	▲	ligne an hour ago \| parent [-]
		100% of anything is a bad idea if you're going to have to draw on them any time soon. Bonds are less volatile than equity, but they're still subject to drops in value.

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Marsymars 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> What do you think the cost would be for protective puts per $1M of equity exposure of a portfolio on a monthly basis? "Bubble Insurance" if you will.

I expect that would not be a cost-effective way of attaining the risk profile you'd be looking for.

I expect there won't be a more cost-effective way of managing your portfolio risk than by simply adjusting your split of broadly-diversified equities vs bonds.

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intrasight 2 hours ago | parent [-]

My homeowners insurance isn't "cost-effective" either but I still do it. I think the reason that investors don't is because they are greedy or irrational or both.

That was the message that I got from a financial podcast I listened to a couple weeks ago anyway.

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Marsymars an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I'd content that homeowners' insurance is quite cost-effective, because there isn't a cheaper alternative to hedge your risk.

I'm saying that for the cost of buying puts to hedge against equity downside in a retirement portfolio, for any given level of risk, you'd probably be better off just selling some of the equities and buying bonds instead.

e.g. try and find any equity-focused ETF with downside protection that generally outperforms a bog-standard stock/bond split total-market ETF for whatever measure of volatility/downside protection that you want.

	▲	kipchak 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think the risk for increasing your bond exposure as compensation would be if instead of a low growth/low inflation scenario (Bonds do well) there's a low growth+high inflation scenario (1940s, 1970s, 2022) and the negative correlation between stocks and bonds doesn't hold.

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duzer65657 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

investors are irrational but actually tend to go the other way - too risk adverse. I'm not sure what a "greedy" investor is, TBH.

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TacticalCoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Take SPY at a strike of $738, per lot of 100 that's $73 800. Take 14 lots, give or take, to make a cool million.

SPY260821P00738000 (OCC symbol: PUT on SPY expiring the 21th of August 2026 at a strike of $738) is $12.20 as I type this, so $1220 per lot. So $16 800 to protect for a month. So $200 K per year.

A solid 20% yearly, unless my math is way off.

Now of course you can buy, instead of a PUT, a PUT debit spread, or you can buy further from the strike, or you can finance or partially finance your PUT or PUT debit spread with a CALL you'd sell (turning it into a covered strangle) etc. That's not the point of this exercise though. And anyway I doubt many retirees have the know-how to do that.

In any case it's well known that the costs to hedge are extremely high.

In 1929 those who had 10% gold for example "only" lost 25% overall: gold has value since thousands of years. My dumb thinking is that if gold has value since thousands of years, there's an extremely high probability that it'll keep value for the few decades I've got left at most.