Investing in mutual funds has been promoted to the average investor for a few decades now, as a way to get into the market without having to know how to buy individual stocks. Yet when the market tanked, both in 2000 during the crash of the dot-com debacle, and in 2008 due to the big investment banks playing games, the average folks with mutual funds didn’t do so well. In the best case, you may be back to where you started, if you started investing in mutual funds ten years ago. In fact, if you run a screen of “top” funds based on Morningstar ratings, you’d be hard pressed to find any fund that did better than 8% returns average for the past ten years.