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The five stages of dealing with grief and tragedy in the stock market:

Denial: “I will not look at my investment statements or check my account online.”

Anger: “Who's responsible for this disaster?”

Bargaining: “Just let my account recover and I'll never make the same dumb mistakes again.”

Depression: “The stock markets are falling again. Whatever.”

Acceptance: “I'll get through this.”

When she set out the five steps through which people go in dealing with tragedy about 40 years ago, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was talking about really serious stuff like being diagnosed with a terminal illness. But there's no question that the five stages are starting to apply to investors weathering the crisis in financial markets.

Dan Richards, a consultant to investment advisers, said he's been interviewing investors lately and found that some of them are in “statement denial,” where they don't open or look at their statements.

Others, like Ray Berendse, an investor from Winnipeg, have moved to the anger stage. Earlier this month, he unloaded on the mutual fund industry in an e-mail to me.

“When are you guys finally going to call a spade a spade and rip the vast majority of mutual fund managers a new [expletive deleted],” he wrote. “Isn't their job as a ‘manager' to mitigate risk for investors and sell their stocks when they can see a train wreck coming?

“I'm not sure what the problem is here. Is it [that] the managers are too busy drinking fine wine and smoking Cuban cigars to pay attention to what is happening out there in the financial world?”

Anger at the fund industry and at investment advisers is a natural feeling at a time when investors are losing money at a rate that would have seemed inconceivable a year or two ago.

“Whenever we're into the kind of markets that we've been in right now, inevitably there's a certain amount of finger-pointing that takes place,” Mr. Richards said. “And by the way, it's not just clients [pointing fingers] at advisers. It's advisers at money managers, and in some cases it's money managers at each other.”

But is the anger justified, or is your portfolio just reflecting the grim conditions in the market this year?

To find out, you have to get past the stage of denial and look at your own portfolio. Unless it's all in guaranteed investment certificates or short-term government bonds, it's going to be down. Way down, most likely.

There's an intellectual approach to measuring your portfolio and an emotional approach, Mr. Richards said. “You can be rational and compare yourself to [financial market] benchmarks. But that's not what most investors use. For some people, their benchmark will be that they should never lose more than 10 per cent of their money, or that they don't do worse than their neighbours.”

The stock markets are down so sharply from midyear peaks that lots of investors have exceeded the worst losses they ever imagined. This leaves us with financial yardsticks, which can be applied to any portfolio, conservative or aggressive.

Our measuring toolbox includes the following:

The S&P/TSX composite total return index, which stands as a proxy for the Canadian stock market and includes both share-price appreciation and dividends.

The S&P 500 stock index, a benchmark that is so widely used we'll overlook the fact that it reflects the returns of big stocks and not medium and smaller corporations; for best results, use S&P 500 returns that are adjusted to reflect Canada-U.S. currency moves.

The MSCI World index, which is a gauge for the global stock market; again, use Canadian-dollar returns.

The DEX Universe Bond index, which is used to track the broad Canadian bond market.

More sophisticated portfolios may require additional benchmarks to truly assess their performance, but these four will do for a lot of investors. Here's how to put them to work.

Start by ensuring you compare apples to apples. All your TSX-listed stocks and Canadian equity funds should be compared against the S&P/TSX composite index, your U.S. stocks and equity funds against the S&P 500, your global funds against the MSCI World index and your bonds or bond funds against the DEX Universe Bond index.

If you're unsure of what benchmark to use for a particular mutual fund, or where to get benchmark data, let Globefund.com help you out. Every fund profile on the site shows long- and short-term returns that are compared with both the average fund in a category and the appropriate benchmark.

One case where you may want to do your own calculations is if you own a fund classified as Canadian-focused equity.

Some very popular funds are in this category – examples would be CI Harbour, CI Canadian Investment, AGF Canadian Large-Cap Dividend-Classic, Mackenzie Ivy Canadian – and they all have significant holdings in U.S. or global stocks in addition to Canadian ones.

You can use the S&P/TSX composite to assess these funds, but you won't be giving them credit for putting some of their assets in markets that didn't fall as much as Canada's in the past 12 months. While the composite total return index fell 31.4 per cent for the 12 months to Oct. 31, the S&P 500 fell 18.2 per cent in Canadian-dollar terms and the MSCI World index fell 25.1 per cent.

The severity of the market downturn is such that even a well-diversified portfolio will be down significantly in the past 12 months.

Emotionally, the degree of loss you've suffered may be hugely disappointing. But intellectually, the fair way to judge your funds and your adviser is to compare your holdings with a mix of benchmarks.

If you have had what you consider to be excessive losses, then discuss it with your adviser. Mr. Richards suggested clients be willing to show more patience with advisers whom they have dealt with profitably over a period of many years.

Advisers are best judged over a span of three years or more, he added.

“If, as a client, you say you're going to judge your adviser by any 12-month period, chances are you're going to be working with a lot of advisers over the years, and the same goes for money managers.”