Responding to a column you wrote a couple of weeks ago, I can’t believe you would advise a 27-year-old to put 30 percent of his portfolio in bonds. If he is looking for safe havens, he should not be in the market. He should be coached on why, at his stage of life, he should be taking the most risk of his life. And he should be taught how in the long term that risk will translate into big dollars.

I enjoy reading your columns and I benefit from them, even though you have a more conservative approach than mine. I am 44 and have about $300,000 in investments, mostly tax deferred and most of it invested in Janus funds. I know I am overweighted in growth and technology, but even after this large correction in recent months I am close to break-even in all funds except Janus Worldwide (so much for international diversification!). Several of my funds have 10-year track records over 20 percent a year - and their worst performance in that time has been comparable to the best years of a bond fund. So how can you say that investors should be prepared for a correction of 50 percent? How many times have top-rated growth funds suffered a 50 percent correction? And even if it happened, isn't it a fundamental rule that until you sell you haven't lost a thing?

We are grandparents and want to start mutual funds for our six grandchildren, aged four months to 18 years. We want separate funds for each of them, and we’d like to start with minimum amounts. We would like to have the money invested for the long term, perhaps to get a start on their retirement, and we want to retain control of this money so that our grandchildren can’t get their hands on it and spend it when they reach 18. What would you recommend?

I am 26 years old, I make close to $46,000 a year, and I'm hoping to go back to school for a graduate degree in the next few years. I have gotten myself into an awkward position. Last March I had accumulated $30,000, and I was faced with the choice of either paying off $25,000 in school loans or investing the money. The market was red hot back then, and I took an extremely aggressive, non-diversified stance because I wanted the money to grow as quickly as possible over two to three years so I could pay off the student loans and still have money left. I put $30,000 into six Janus funds, and by late in October I had a loss of 7 percent. Now I'm questioning my strategy. Should I take the loss and sell my shares? And if I do that, should I reinvest it in some other mutual funds? Or should I pay off the school loans?

How can I find out exactly what stocks my mutual fund holds? The OpenFund makes this information available instantly. But with other funds, all I get is something twice a year that tells me what the fund owned months earlier. Can I get up-to-date information from the fund or on the Web? Shouldn’t shareholders have a right to this information?

I know most mutual funds pay out dividends near the end of the year. Does it make sense to move money in a retirement account into such funds toward the end of the year in order to pick up these dividends?