A rather simplistic way of looking at why BRM has been a poor performer, I plugged all 18 stocks of the portfolio into Google finance and come up with a 1 year chart (see chart attached).
Attachment 5656
It was going OK from February through to October, but since late October, it's down about 12%, while the ASX200 is up 0.6%, more or less sideways.
Sure this only shows equal weightings between all portfolio holdings, but you get the picture.
Quite simply, some of the holdings have just been pure stinkers for the past year.
CRH: -66.01%
MCP: -46.46%
MMS: -34.56%
NBL: -40.96%
TRS: -39.29%
UBI: -52.9%