<prompt> Human: As the stock market crashed this week, I was reconsidering the conventional wisdom that a retirement savings portfolio should be increasingly shifted away from stocks and toward bonds as the age of retirement approaches. Ignoring year-to-year fluctuations from recessions, the stock market out-performs other investments handily over the scale of decades. Therefore, I should get the best cumulative interest by putting 100 of my retirement savings in a balanced stock portfolio say, a mix of US and international index funds with essentially no bonds. When the age of retirement is truly imminent, I could make a big shift toward lower-risk investments at some moment when the stock market was really high... but for the decades between 25 and 55, whats the use of an incremental movement to a lower risk portfolio? The obvious rebuttal is that if we have a 1929 style crash, you dont want to be left with nothing, but if that happened municipalities would start defaulting on bonds too and there would really be no such thing as a safe investment.  <response>: As the stock market crashed this weekWasnt a crash. 