You should have been buying bonds in larger amounts over the past years. Any target date retirement plan is doing that for you, because you are targeting a % of your portfolio in bonds/stocks you are probably buying more stocks than bonds now to get into balance. If you are self managed and haven't been doing that - well too bad, delay your retirement.

Note that even if you are retired you should still have some stocks as a hedge against your retirement having more than a year left before you die.

Well personally I'm not going to retire tomorrow but in my specific case I do have a retirement plan which buys from an allegedly vast portfolio and yet right now, after almost 10 years, if I take into account commission fees I own like 10% less of what I put into it. So at least in this case, putting my savings under a mattress would have been a better option.

There are some bad plans. Demand your HR department give you better options.

Trouble is, it's easy to identify the bad plans in hindsight. Reliably predicting which plans will be good for the next few decades and which will be bad may not be so easy.

If you didn't choose a good plan that is on you. If a good plan wasn't an option you should complain. Most big companies had good plans. Fidelity's target date plan have been good, so why are those not an option?

>but what about if I have been in the stock market for 10+ years and I wanted to get out in the next month for my retirement?

You shouldn't be. Unless you plan to die soon and really live it up, you should be have money you need now, money you need next year, money you need next decade, etc. When you approach retirement, you should start moving the money you need now (at the point of retirement) into much less volatile investments. A year later you should move the money you need next year (at the point of retirement) into a similar vehicle. As you get closer, each bucket of money eventually moves into the safest vehicle possible (FDIC insured savings/checking account, ready for you to use it in day to day transactions). At the point of retirement, assuming you plan to live for a few more decades, most of your money should still be in the market but what you need in the short term should be in cash already and what you need in the medium term should be in a low risk investment to protect against inflation.

This is the general pattern, the exact situation depend upon your own financial situation, health situation, family situation, and many other factors that a financial/investment adviser would be able to help you with.

if you had been in the market for the last ten years with SP500 you would be up something like 150% of your initial investment, even with the latest drops. You would be very upset about the latest drop, but you would still be happy with your choice.

EDIT: saw your other reply: sadly many investment funds are just not worth it, it's not your fault, banks and similar are often incentivized to sell you a fund which has high fees and generally trails the market, the best choice is to invest in low cost index-tracking funds, but this is not obvious knowledge.