But don't confuse "disappointment" with "no value." If you're interested in the product – whether from the point of view of a buyer or a competitor – you can glean much information from a product presentation. In "The Art of War," Sun Tzu explains the importance of "walking in the shoes" of your enemy. Unless and until you can think like them, you are doomed – both as a potential buyer as well as a competitor.

Here's the real misleading thing about selling annuity sales – it's too easy to use behavioral finance to justify buying the product, even if other options are in the best interests of the investor. Worse, decades of portfolio-centric training (see "Explaining 401k Investing Basics Through the Lens of History") in the retirement industry makes this a slam-dunk sale.

Behavioral economics has been around for decades. Innovators began using it in the form of "behavioral finance" before the turn of the 20th century. If you're thinking of Roger's Innovation Adoption Bell Curve, we are well past the era of "Early Adopters" and perhaps into the "Late Majority" portion of the chart.

That means the only folks who haven't begun using behavioral finance tools are "Laggards." More significantly, however, in order to differentiate themselves, purveyors of behavioral finance have begun to push the envelope in terms of application. That means risking overstepping into the dark side of behavioral psychology.

This is where positioning retirement investments from a portfolio-centric point of view and leveraging that frame of reference to sell annuities comes into play. And this is where sitting in on a sales presentation helps.

The fact that retirement investors have not bought annuities en masse upsets two groups of people. First, academics are so flummoxed by this phenomenon they call it the "Annuity Paradox." Likewise, annuity sale professionals are disappointed more retirement investors haven't bought this highly profitable product. These two constituencies (albeit through representatives employed by the same firm) offered their "solution" to the "problem" at the CFDD 2014 conference here.

The issue with most financial research is that it relies on a large sample size to cheaply produce meaningful statistics. By avoiding any discussion of individual securities, the portfolio-centric view handily conforms to this need. It allows the research to make broad, often common-sense conclusions, on the average of a set of data points.

In selling annuities, it's very useful to play up loss-aversion. Any portfolio has a range of returns over time. There is no guaranteed minimum return. Annuities can offer this. It is therefore easy, if done correctly, to use behavioral finance techniques to justify the purchase of annuities.

But what if you take a securities-centric point of view? Now, the fluctuations of portfolios become less relevant, as individual securities can be purchased that guarantee the near-term income stream at no risk.

For example, if the average recovery from a market occurs in, say two years, wouldn't a viable option be to keep two years in cash and invest the rest for the long-term. This way, you can continually rebalance when the market is rising and hold off on rebalancing until the recovery is complete without jeopardizing your income needs.

What do you think?