THE RULE BREAKER PORTFOLIO is, most importantly, a real-money portfolio. The bucks you see us reporting in each of our trades are lean, green, and Foolishly mean, accepted at all fine establishments, bar none. Take comfort, first of all, in knowing that we have our own money down on the table on every trade we make.

Your portfolio is a real portfolio with real money. We've made ours one, too. You make real trades, WE make real trades. You pay commissions, WE pay commissions. You have to accept the bid/ask spread on every trade, WE have to pay the piping market maker too. Your returns come right off the data on your brokerage statement, so do ours. . . all real money, and adjusted for interest and dividends. There's nothing "virtual" about any of this; we all sink or swim -- in the best, most Foolish tradition -- with our own decisions and our own money.

How many other publications or services do you know that run an actual, live, real-money portfolio?

We don't know many, and of those we know, none of them goes halfway toward offering the combination of real numbers, daily updates, hands-on management, and breadth of information available for The Rule Breaker Portfolio. Some publications and services might print the price where they bought a stock, but the price isn't the the real price one pays to buy ("the ask price"); it's the "last trade" price, which ignores the costly bid/ask spread payment. Some do print the real price they paid, but make no mention of commissions. And some try to adjust for commissions and bid/ask, but just put Monopoly money on the line. Some don't even tell you when to sell their stocks. . . just when to buy them. And most can't compete with the constant stream of useful information about their holdings that you'll see issuing out of The Motley Fool online.

It gets better.

We tell you what we're going to buy and how much BEFORE we buy it! (see the details) We're not one of those services that buys a stock and then tells you about it a day (or a week) later. We've Foolishly designed the portfolios in our Hall of Portfolios so that they could be duplicated, if anyone were inclined to do so. We don't actually want you to do this, and don't derive any financial benefit from you doing so. Hey, please remember that the whole point of Foolishness is to make your own decisions, sink or swim based on your own beliefs. You'll never actually learn anything, or feel real satisfaction, if you're copying others... as true of investing as it is of Life. Learn. Learning is the main point of all of this. Anyway, we did make the Rule Breaker Portfolio duplicable simply because so many other financial services claim returns that you never could possibly duplicate. We don't like that. We're Fools.

So invest time in this forum, and we think you'll reap many benefits. Listen to our talented staff and our talented readers, and always back up anything you read online with your own homework, your own research. Our online portfolios are in place to "walk the walk" as we "talk the talk" -- what any good educator should be doing. In this case, you have educators reporting to the highest standards in order to serve you: daily updates on portfolio numbers, announcements of company news, ongoing opinion on every holding, and an opportunity to discuss these and a few thousand other stocks with people from across the nation There's nothing like it anywhere else, cyberspace or otherwise.