Good mutual fund returns are hard to come by these days. Most actively managed funds are don’t give their investors market-beating returns. It shouldn’t come as a surprise though. Regulations have have helped this industry (and also hurt it), and as a result, this has pushed down returns for many individuals.

There are a few ways that you can try to get better returns from your mutual fund, but, don’t look for these products to be the silver bullet for your retirement that they are pitched as.

You can boost the returns on your mutual funds by not paying attention to past performance numbers that are posted by the fund company. These are, many times, inflated. By using simple averages instead of compound averages and effective yields, the fund can show you returns that are higher than the actual returns posted by the fund.

Unless you have a scientific calculator, you’re almost certainly not going to get too far.

The second step in boosting your mutual fund’s return may be just to sell the fund. I know that’s not really boosting the return of the fund, but you may be better off investing in something else. Actually, that’s one of the basic rules of investing: understand what you are investing in. Unless you understand every business that that mutual fund holds, you are asking for trouble. You’re not being a smart investor, you’re just guessing.

One final way of getting more out of your fund is to choose funds that invest in small cap companies. You could also do well by just investing in smaller funds. A smaller mutual fund would probably be the essential point here. Think about how easy it would be for a mom and pop shop to double in size as versus a giant corporation like Walmart.