I've been a Fool for a long time.

In fact, next month it will be 10 years since I was first brought into the fiscal fold. I had been lurking around the Fool site on AOL for months by then. At the time, I was helping to head up the Investors Roundtable on GEnie, a Wall Street forum on a rudimentary online service owned by General Electric (NYSE:GE). It was a hub of great techie geeks but failed to catch on, given its text-based interface. One can argue that I was lurking at the Fool's site for the sake of kicking the tires of the competition.

It was no contest, really. Here were two brothers turning the investing world upside down. They were demystifying the market and empowering the individual investor every step of the way. It would have been a noble pursuit in and of itself, but there was something more. When the Foolish community started rallying around a stock like Iomega (NYSE:IOM) or America Online, their vision proved true. The good guys were finishing first!

With GEnie users defecting over to the more user-friendly AOL in general, and The Motley Fool in particular, I got swept into the migration process. Mark Young and I weren't making much of a difference running an investing platform with a handful of active users, and so I succumbed to my Foolish calling.

It started with a few discussion board posts. I had won a Post of the Day award on the Fool site for a drawn-out battle plan to get Discovery Zone turned around. Then I was honored again for a post in the Rainforest Café board. That's where I caught Tom Gardner's attention. The Fool was getting ready to launch an industry area and needed someone to cover food stocks. It was a sector I knew well, having grown up in my family's frozen-food distributorship and owning a portfolio stuffed with restaurant companies, and I jumped at the chance.

Changing my original AristotleM screen name to take on the food-sector-ready "Edible" moniker was one of the best decisions that I ever made. I was at the right place. At the right time. With the right brothers.

Steady as a market-beating drum
For the past 10 years, I have been fortunate enough to see Tom and David grow as investors. That doesn't mean their approaches have changed much. David is still picking out great growth stocks just as they are starting to revolutionize their sectors. Tom is still methodical about applying the appropriate valuation gauges to ferret out refreshingly mispriced equities.

You know what's brilliant, though? Despite their different slants on picking stocks, both have been able to nail down superior returns. They did it online in the 1990s with a real-money portfolio that included winners like Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) and Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN). They're doing it on this side of the millennium, too, with their premium research newsletters.

Since launching Motley Fool Stock Advisor in April of 2002, David and Tom have trounced the market. David's picks have soared by 54% on average, while Tom's return has been a spectacular 65%. The S&P 500's average reward in that time? A mere 17%.

There are many roads that lead to a better portfolio. David's path found him recommending Marvel Enterprises (NYSE:MVL) three summers ago, just as the company was starting to cash in on its rich library of comic book characters. The stock has been a five-bagger since his timely selection. Two years ago, Tom figured that Mid Atlantic Medical Services was an undervalued player in health care. He was spot-on. Mid Atlantic went on to be acquired in an all-stock deal by UnitedHealth (NYSE:UNH) a year later, and investors have seen their original investment triple.

Buy one, get one free
Having two of the most successful investing minds over the past decade in one place is huge. It's like having John Madden and Mel Kiper consult with you over your fantasy football draft this week. It's like having Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck at your side as you make dinner tonight.

In the past, two heads really have been better than one, and in recent years, the growing Fool community has expanded on the sum of those two market-savvy minds exponentially. There's plenty of gray matter to go around these days. Yes, that's right. I'm counting you, too.

Whether that means that you give Stock Advisor a shot through a free 30-day trial or simply absorb all the free online content provided here daily, you're at the right place. Let's touch bases in another ten years to see how it all played out for you.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz remembers when Tom asked him to come aboard in October of 1995, and meeting David shortly thereafter at the opening of the Rainforest Café in Disney World. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. Amazon.com, Marvel, and UnitedHealth are Motley Fool Stock Advisor picks. The Fool has adisclosure policy.