What are the factors that influence the performance of MFs?

Few of the factors that influence the performance of a mutual fund are the investment strategies that the fund management team follows and whether they are sticking to that.

Another factor is the style of investing that the fund is actually into, for example, whether it is a growth fund or a value fund. For instance, if the fund's objective is to follow value style of investing and if there are hardly any value picks in the market then that will definitely have an impact on the performance.

Another important factor is the quality of the portfolio that the fund management team actually builds in. Here what I am referring to is there are some fund houses where there are strict checks on risk management, so they will only have safe bets, but there are some fund management teams which take a lot of bets on the basis of fund manager conviction. So if the conviction goes wrong that will have a severe impact on the performance of the fund.