Here's how to reconcile the Cathy vs. Dodge debate:
Cathy is talking about the actual chances of retirement success (which has the problem of being impossible to predict). Dodge is talking about the forecasted chances of retirement success using history as a guide (which has the problem of not necessarily being accurate).
If your portfolio value suddenly shrinks in half overnight due to market fluctuations, have your actual chances of retirement success suddenly gotten smaller? Of course not. But would you still be just as likely to be comfortable pulling the plug and declaring FIRE? Of course not.
We use the historical research and history-based calculators to make predictions about sustainable withdrawal rates in the future. This necessarily assumes that the past will to some extent predict the future, which we all know may or may not be true, but it's the best we have to go on. When we say a 4% withdrawal rate has a 95% chance of success, we really mean that historically it was successful 95% of the time. In that sense, the success rate does fluctuate with the market. If your $1 million portfolio drops to $500k overnight, then your "chances of success" (as forecasted by history) of retiring at that moment have been cut in half, even though your actual chances of success have not.
Good summary of the differences, Brooklyn Guy!
If OP is to retire tomorrow and has enough in his stash for a given SWR, then he has it done, won the game, got his nut covered, over the road, under the road, flat out, finished, QED. So why would anyone gamble with a sure deal and go 100% equities? Doesn't it make sense to put aside, say, at least, 5 or 10 (or more) years of money into bonds, as buckets to draw on? As he does so, his AA tilts upwards, but he is still in a safer zone, c.f. Kitces.
https://www.kitces.com/blog/should-equity-exposure-decrease-in-retirement-or-is-a-rising-equity-glidepath-actually-better/ and a fine tune of the concept at:
https://www.kitces.com/blog/accelerating-the-rising-equity-glidepath-with-treasury-bills-as-portfolio-ballast/"For the past 20 years, due both to the growing research on safe withdrawal rates, the adoption of Monte Carlo analysis, and just a difficult period of market returns, there has been an increasing awareness of the importance and impact that market volatility can have on a retiree's portfolio. Often dubbed the phenomenon of "sequence risk", retirees are cautioned that they must either spend conservatively, buy guarantees, or otherwise manage their investments to help mitigate the danger of a sharp downturn in the early years.
One popular way to manage the concern of sequence risk is through so-called "bucket strategies" that break parts of the portfolio into pools of money to handle specific goals or time horizons. For instance, a pool of cash might cover spending for the next 3 years, an account full of bonds could handle the next 5-7 years, and equities would only be needed for spending more than a decade away, "ensuring" that no withdrawals will need to occur from the portfolio if there is an early market decline.
Yet the reality is that strict implementation of a bucket strategy is more than just an exercise in mental accounting; it can actually distort the portfolio's asset allocation, leading to an increasing amount of equity exposure over time as fixed income assets are spent down while equities continue to grow. Yet recent research shows that despite the contrary nature of the strategy - allowing equity exposure to increase during retirement when conventional wisdom suggests it should decline as clients age - it turns out that a "rising equity glidepath" actually does improve retirement outcomes! If market returns are bad in the early years, a rising equity glidepath ensures that clients will dollar cost average into markets at cheaper and cheaper valuations; and if markets are good... well, clients won't have a lot to worry about in retirement anyway (except perhaps how much excess money will be left over at the end of their life)."