First Portfolio

[Jeff W]

I have a lot of money sitting around earning 0% interest right now because I've been lazy about investing my money. I want to put together a simple portfolio(taxable account) of passive and active funds with low expense ratios.

A few questions:

1. I should use ETFs, yes? I'm investing a substantial amount of money.

2. Should I go light on actively managed funds or should I gamble that the top low expense ratio active funds will outperform the index funds in the future?

It seems to me that if you take X funds, then some percentage of them will outperform the index funds just because of variance.

Some Active funds that look attractive to me are the Dodge and Cox International DODFX and the Loomis Sayles Bond Funds (ER .75 or 1.0 depending on size of investment) LSBRX and LSBDX. I'm also looking at the Bridgeway Ultra Small fund BRSIX but it has a high ER .7% for a quasi-index fund.

3. As a beginning investor with a long investment horizon, should I incorporate bonds into my portfolio? If I'm going to have funds in an ING 4.5% interest account, should I just put most of that in bonds instead? I'm leaning towards including 20% bonds, but could go anywhere from 0-40%.

5. How does this portfolio look:

Dodge and Cox Funds:

DODFX - International Large Value (ER 0.7%)

Loomis Sayles Funds:

LSBRX - Bonds (ER 1.0% or .74% if I put in $100,000)

Vanguard ETFs:

VB - Small Cap Blend (ER .10%)
VO - Mid Cap Blend (ER .13%)
VV - Large Cap Blend (ER .07%)

I'm not sure of my allocation %s yet.

I think I need an international small cap fund with low ER in here. I'll have to look into that.

Do I need to chop my funds up further(small value, small growth, etc)?