By Scott Ronalds

Early last year we published a report on how to assess your portfolio’s performance. The paper laid out a framework for evaluating your investments, focusing on five areas: gathering the facts, reviewing the market environment, analyzing the numbers, assessing the potential for future returns, and determining when to take action.

The report was well received by investors and won the Best Stewardship Initiative at the Canadian Investment Awards last month (read more).

Today we’re releasing an updated version of the report. All the market returns have been updated to December 31, 2011, and we’ve made a few small refinements.

We’ll also be publishing a supplementary report next week that uses the framework to assess the performance of the Steadyhand Balanced Income Portfolio, which is a hypothetical model portfolio used by a large number of our clients.

Assessing performance is a key element of investing. Our goal is to provide a practical framework to make the task less onerous.