New Delhi, June 15 -- A mutual fund's return is often the first number investors look at. However, two funds can deliver similar returns over three or five years, yet one may have taken significantly more risk, experienced sharper swings or relied heavily on market momentum to get there.

This is why mutual fund factsheets include a range of risk and performance metrics such as standard deviation, beta, alpha, Sharpe ratio and Sortino ratio. These numbers help investors understand not just how much a fund earned, but how it earned those returns.

While they cannot predict future performance, they can offer valuable insights into how a fund has behaved in the past and how it compares with its peers. Here's what these commonly used ratios m...