An interesting article in the New York Times regarding the use of collars to hedge retail investment portfolios. 

Collars involve buying a put and selling a call to dampen overall volatility and protect against meaningful downside risk.

An alternative of sorts to annuities and other instruments that could be used to hedge sequence of returns risk.

Interesting to note that there is a mutual fund (very expensive) that uses the collar option strategy.  Name of the fund is "The Collar Fund" and symbol is COLLX.  Another fund is named the Gateway Fund (GATEX).

The NYT article can be found by clicking here.