Today, few advisors, and too few consumers understand the unbridled speculation occurring within their retirement savings plans. Regrettably the majority of the population has been bamboozled by the media, the government, Wall Street, and the asset management industrial complex that the value of their 401(k) s always go up. Stock markets do not always go up. The truth is that attempts to predict, forecast, or model returns has confounded academics and mathematicians for decades. Take a brief look at Japan. The Nikkei 225 in Japan, which is similar to our S&P 500 index of stocks crashed in 1990 and was one of the most spectacular stock market collapses in history.