moving money away from heavy stock portfolio to stable bonds? for a while

Nope, In fact I'm looking at goign more agreessive. Everything is ON SALE right now.

It will be even cheaper later.

Not me. I'm in it for the long haul, so the ups and downs don't bug me too much. I'm happy with my 401K allocations for now.

I haven't done anything yet. If it continues to slide (please, God, don't let that happen) eventually I'll re-allocate and take some of the money out of the bond funds and put it into the stock funds.

One of the things I looked at when I chose the funds I did was how they performed in 2000-2001. They didn't tank as badly as the rest of the market. They're in it for the long run and so am I.

i hope it goes down further so i can buy more. 8k DOW sounds good to me

Well Guess I'll stick it out a little longer, normaly I don't get the jitter's but when you see 400 - 800 a day losing makes me think back to much. Just recovered from loses in 2000/2001. I am happy about buying low and market will rebound.

Moving in and out of mutual funds trying to time the market is tricky. It can be done, but you have to be GOOD at it, and have a proven system based on a lot of different factors.

Me, I just don't worry about it with my mutual funds. My trading account (mad money... and NO, not Cramer mad money) is 75 percent cash right now, and I am waiting until we are in a confirmed rally before jumping back in whole hog... I do have some stocks that I buy on the way down, but I am only picking at things in VERY small amounts.

I am a value guy, and I like to see my value names take out the 52 week lows before I even begin to get excited about them...

gonna ride the until I get too sick or fall off....whichever happens first

I'm sitting tight. I like the funds I'm in and even though things are a little volatile, I'm confident we'll have a bull market for the next 18 to 20 months.

Don't forget the fact that 401K accounts are OFTEN hit with hidden fees. Generally speaking, employers won't mention these hidden fees (passed on to you by employers) unless pressed to do so.

fees are not hidden. they have to be disclosed.

We're beginning to see the effects of the failures of the subprime lending industry.

Personally I think that we're only seeing the beginning of this problem, and this will create uncertainty for some time to come.

Kind of. Some 401Ks sell funds in "units" instead of shares. The shares to units conversion is where they get thier fees, and there is no mention of it in the prospectus. I know, my last 401K popped me with this one.

Ah. That would explain something I noticed after the "correction". With classic bad timing, my company's 6% contribution went into my account the day of the big drop in the Dow. (This is in lieu of a pension plan; everyone gets 6% of their previous year's salary contributed regardless of whether they contribute anything else and it's given at the end of Feb. to employees who were active as of the previous December 31.)

Even though our investment options include publicly-traded funds, I couldn't match the cost of the investments made in AEPGX with that money with the reported share prices for February 26 or 27, or March 1. They were off by a factor of about 8. Now I know why. Sneaky. I suspect that we got the February 26 price, though- before the drop. A small annoyance in the long-term view, but still an annoyance.

But to go back to the OP's question- look at the graphs of values for your mutual funds since inception. The huge drop in the Dow in October, 1987 probably looks like a little dent in the curve now. That may be what we have now. (In my amateur opinion- this advice is worth exactly what you paid for it.) The 1999-2001 drop probably had a lot worse effect- a nightmarish long, slow drift. In either case, it's not time to panic and even if we were getting into a 1999-2001 scenario I'd be moving more into stocks.

You also have to beware of redemption fees that are assessed on certain funds if you have held them for less than 90 days. Also some companies will slap an excessive trader restriction on your account if you try to trade a mutual fund like a stock and continue to move in and out of them because of market fluctuations.