By Scott Ronalds

"We strongly recommend that you do an annual review to re-confirm your plan, assess performance and do a general checkup on your portfolio. A thorough, annual review is better than multiple glances over the course of the year." This is one of the key takeaways from our report on the Five Essential Elements to Being a Better Investor.

We’ve updated our annual assessment of our funds’ performance that uses the framework laid out in our paper How is Your Portfolio Doing?

The report, titled How is Steadyhand Doing?, analyzes the Steadyhand Balanced Income Portfolio, which is a hypothetical model portfolio used by a number of our clients. We’ve chosen this portfolio because it encompasses all of our long-term funds and is a good representation of the firm’s overall asset base. (Note: it’s our intention to use the Founders Fund as the basis for future assessments, but at this stage the fund has too short a track record to make the analysis meaningful.)

Our Balanced Income Portfolio provided a positive return in 2014, but didn’t fully participate in the strong equity markets and weak Canadian dollar. As for the components of the Portfolio, the Income Fund and Equity Fund had good years, while the Small-Cap Equity Fund and Global Equity Fund struggled. But as we stress in our report, one year is too short a period from which to draw conclusions. We look back seven years (the longest period we have for our funds) and cover not only the up part of the investment cycle (2009-2014) but also the down (2008).

Both reports can be accessed by clicking the above links or visiting our website’s Library.

Management fees and expenses all may be associated with mutual fund investments. Please read the prospectus before investing. Mutual funds are not guaranteed, their values change frequently and past performance may not be repeated. The indicated rates of return are the historical annual total returns including changes in unit value and reinvestment of all distributions and do not take into account sales, redemption, distribution or optional charges or income taxes payable by any securityholder that would have reduced returns.