An alternate view of how to invest your retirement funds

I've been watching Tastytrade off and on for a couple of years now. They've mostly been focused on small accounts, but recently have started a series called Top Dogs focussed on those with more substantial assets: $250K and up.

This is a 12-part series and so far only 4 have been shown. But the recommendations they make vary wildly with the standard financial planner's:

• You get to go short as well as long (that is, bet on a market segment to go down and not just up)
• "Reducing basis" (selling covered calls and covered puts)  is a standard part of the basic strategy
• According to their research, one can pick from a standard bunch of not-very-correlated underlying instruments (S&P 500 futures, Nasdaq Futures, a U.S. Treasury bond ETF, an emerging market ETF, and a gold ETF ... and it doesn't make any difference in what direction you pick any of them (short/long) and you won't be up/down more than 15% in any year. They ran a huge backtest simulation on 243 up/down combinations and proved this out.
• They suggest leverage in trading for yourself. For example, Portfolio Margin gives you more trading "bang for your buck", as does futures trading. In either case this can give you around 3 to 1 leverage, allowing you to control, for example, $300,000 in underlying assets while only putting up $100000.

This seems worth a look if you're paying fees to a financial planner or a mutual fund. Good luck!