If you can avoid the deceptive claims, hidden risks and half-baked strategies, you can, in fact, use mutual funds to fund your retirement years.

Before you sink another dime into a mutual fund, learn how to see through the baloney and turn your fund portfolio into the retirement nest egg you deserve. Here are seven deadly mutual fund mistakes to avoid.

Lots of people say that index funds are the only investment you need, but indexing is not the best answer. Take Vanguard’s 500 Index, for example. It’s the family’s largest fund, with more than $80 billion in assets. In fact, it’s the third-largest mutual fund in the world.

But it’s not the safest index fund, nor is it the best-performing index fund. During the last bear market, investors lost more than $40 billion with the fund. And 20% of the fund’s assets are tied up in just 10 stocks and nearly half of its assets are invested in just three sectors.

The bottom line: Index funds, even the best ones, simply don’t compare to Vanguard’s actively managed funds.