Achieving and documenting incrementally higher returns.  It matters.  The power and potential are significant.  In a brief discussion with an investment industry colleague yesterday, we lamented the charlatans and carnival barkers in the investment arena who soap box about spectacular returns.  All the while, a skeptical investing nation yawns when somebody like David Gardner beats the market by 710 basis points (+7.1%) over 14 years of investing.  The challenge is (1) capturing the attention of seekers with numbers like 15% when the barkers are howling things like “81% guaranteed” and (2) educating the masses about the impact of years and a few extra percentage points vividly on display in the Schlossian graphic below.

We’ll be looking at a few of our demonstration portfolios as we did for David Gardner’s RuleBreakers, but for now, we’ll simply observe that the MANIFEST 40 has 10.6 years under its belt with an annualized total return of 9.0% and a relative (excess) return of +3.6%

Feel free to participate in a collective pat on the back in consideration of the performance of your most widely-followed stocks.

This slide from this weekend’s Super Investor presentation underscores and hammers home the powerful potential behind achieving a an extra percentage point advantage or two … and why — as a community of investors — we aim for +5%.