youbet
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
I really like FIRECalc and have the spreadsheet data from it that told me how things would have gone in the Great Depression and also the great inflation of the 70's. I knew I'd be a nervous wreck if the portfolio went down as badly over several years like the worst case that FIRECalc showed -- even if it had a 100% success rate.
BUT, it does not prepare one for the emotional turmoil of watching things go down. The decline last fall was kind of shocking to me even though I've been investing for many years and consider myself a thoughtful, careful investor. We are down to about 77% of what we had in Oct 2007 including expenses and all.
FireCalc has never let me down.......always 100% accurate in doing what it does. My own sometimes misguided interpretations and analysis of the output, however, has led me astray.
As you say, a FireCalc test that shows zero failures (100% success) leads many to expect "smooth sailing" over the life of their retirement and in fact they may wind up with a roller coaster of ups and downs with perhaps gut wrenching near failures along the way. But as long as they don't completely run out of money, it's a 100% success!
Like you, I've been looking at investment strategies to tone down the variation since, three years into ER, I'm already finding the dips and dives to be upsetting and worrisome. I'm doing this despite the fact that these strategies reduce the average ending balance. That is, lower X-Bar but also smaller Sigma.
I find it useful to take FireCalc output for the terminal year and format it as a histogram in excel. That shows me clearly my probability of having my concluding balance at or near zero at the end despite the fact my run turned out to be 100% successful...... I didn't actually run out of money, just came damn close in a number of cases!
"100% probability of success" in FireCalc does not mean guaranteed smooth sailing or ending with most of what you started with!