That was the message that I got from a financial podcast I listened to a couple weeks ago anyway.
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.
And more specifically, it's not low growth/high inflation that kills bond portfolio returns, it's interest rates increasing that devalue bonds, i.e. the transition from low inflation to high inflation. So yeah, you can construct a portfolio that hedges against that... but I'd be surprised if you can do it without decreasing your risk-adjusted expected returns below a plain stock/bond index fund - whatever hedging method you use is either going to increase your interest-rate risk (bonds), or your inflation-rate risk (cash), or is going to limit your upside (buffer etfs), or is just going sap your upfront returns (protective puts).
To me the diversification hedge options (say GUNR) seem like they are helping you get closer to regime neutral. Or in other words you are giving up returns to cover more macro scenarios and betting less on what the future looks like.
It's effectively impossible to hedge against every possibility, including temporary drawdowns, while still having positive returns after inflation.
No. With insider information.