By Scott Ronalds

We encourage investors to undertake a thorough performance review once a year, every year. And we walk the talk. We’ve updated our annual assessment of our funds’ performance that uses the framework laid out in our paper How is Your Portfolio Doing? (which itself is an updated version of an award-winning paper we originally published in 2011).

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)

It was a good year for our funds. Our equity funds were all up more than 20%, and our Income Fund turned in a positive return in a year when the Canadian bond market lost ground. But as we stress in our report, one year is too short a period from which to draw conclusions. We look back six years (the longest period we have for our funds) and cover not only the up part of the investment cycle (2009-2013) but also the down (2008).

The conclusion? Well, we don’t want to spoil it …

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 compounded 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.