The Rule Breaker portfolio fared well today, rising over 2.6%. The market didn't do too badly, either. The Motley Fool NOW 50 index rose 1.59%. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq and S&P 500 rose 2.45% and 1.23%, respectively.

If you've been clicking around Fooldom in the last week, you probably haven't been able to miss advertisements for my upcoming Rule Breaker Seminar. I certainly appreciate the flattery of the ads, and the excellent work of our Fool Labs production team, but are you a bit sick of seeing me all over the place in the white suit? I'm tired of looking at me!

ANYWAY, this said, I did want to spend a few sentences explaining exactly what the seminar is, and why I'm excited about it.

Starting at the end of this month, you as a seminar customer will receive 10 separate original dispatches from me, offering Rule Breaker education and insights. My aim is to get you to think like a Rule Breaker investor -- and, not only that, but to work together with you and thousands of other Fools to locate a new crop of Rule Breakers.

All the seminar participants will be broken up into separate teams (of many people -- no specific pressure on you). At the end of each of the dispatches, I pose a question to you and your team. You click through to your team's message board and respond, and you get to read the responses of everyone else on the team. In effect, we'll be working together to think through the technologies, business models, and possibilities of the next decade.

We'll then select from these a handful of companies that, by the end of the seminar, we pinpoint as potential Rule Breakers. Some will sink and some will swim, no doubt. But I expect that within that group of companies we will identify a few of the best performers across all stock markets over the next 10-15 years. The Rule Breaker approach swings for the fences, as you know.

It's going to be extremely enjoyable and quite a valuable experience, I should hope! Signups conclude on February 23rd, so if you're interested in enrolling, click here to find out more.

Hey ho, whaddayaknow? Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) helped the portfolio today, rising 10%. The online retailer of increasing amounts of stuff had no meaningful announcements, but online retailer Buy.com had a huge initial public offering (IPO) today, rising 100% and raising almost $200 million. You know what? Buy.com also crashed, hard, mid-day -- the site, that is. If you had any doubt about an IPO being a major PR event, look no further.

It'll be interesting to see if, in time, Buy.com (Nasdaq: BUYX) stock does similar, or different, things. The company's strategy is to be like Amazon.com, except it's outsourcing its fulfillment. (Notice the proper use of it's/its within the same sentence! For more on this, read yesterday's Fribble.) Last year, Buy.com did sales of about $600 million. Present value, after today? $3.5 billion. My money won't be moving that way, anytime soon, I don't think.

Presumably, this sort of valuation for Buy.com is what perked up our shares of Amazon. A cursory read of our Amazon.com message board reveals a whole lot of continued bearishness on the part of its most vocal contributors. A look at the top three most recommended posts in the past month (which you can discover via our Best of interface, which can find you the top posts on any stock board over whatever length of time you like), shows that two of those three are entitled "Case for Selling Your Amazon" and (referring to the latest report) "A horrible quarter for Amazon!"

When the board turns bullish, perhaps then I will sell. I don't usually have such a contrarian take on our community participation, but in this case I've been reading the same incorrect arguments (e.g., "no barrier to entry") for so long that I'm clutching my Amazon shares even more tightly than before, these days. It's amazing to me that the company that is #1 in consumer e-commerce at the dawn of e-commerce receives so much disdain from some who watch it like robins looking for worms. I think we'll all look back someday and realize this was a revolutionary company that was a no-brainer stock pick. Reminds me of the way that America Online is treated today -- as if everyone should have realized it way back in the early '90s -- a brainlessly obvious stock pick. It would be the decade that AMERICA went ONLINE, after all!

So often it's the obvious things that, quite contrarily, make the most money. Right before our very eyes. Even as impassioned commentators exhort the public to avoid or short the stock of this "overvalued" company with "no earnings" that will get "crushed" by "hordes of more powerful competitors!" Etc.

Dragging down the portfolio's returns today were the ever-volatile Celera (NYSE: CRA), off 5%, as well as DuPont (NYSE: DD) and Goodyear Tire (NYSE: GT), the latter having been a TRUE Dow Dog for our portfolio.

Finally tonight, take a look at our top discussions on our message boards anytime you like, which you can click into and bookmark. In fact, our new message boards main page has been restructured to give you quicker, cleaner access to the thousands of messages (across so many topics) that we get each day -- the best thing about Fooldom, if you ask me!