Motley Fool Stock Advisor, the investment newsletter service run by brothers David and Tom Gardner, has posted a 964% average return since its February 2002 launch, more than four times the 213% gain of the S&P 500 over the same 24-year stretch, according to the service's official performance disclosures as of Aug. 27.

The headline figure has circulated widely in recent Motley Fool marketing materials and financial media coverage, positioning the service as one of the longer-running examples of a subscription stock-picking newsletter that claims to have meaningfully beaten the broader market over multiple decades. But a closer look at how that number is calculated shows it depends heavily on a small handful of extraordinarily successful early recommendations that current and prospective subscribers cannot access today.

Stock Advisor calculates its results using a time-weighted return methodology, the same general approach mandated by the CFA Institute for institutional portfolio managers, according to an analysis published by TechTimes. Under this method, each individual stock recommendation is tracked from the day it was made and compared against the S&P 500's performance from that same starting point, and the service's headline return is the simple arithmetic average of every recommendation's individual result across the newsletter's full 24-year history.

That structure means every pick, whether made in 2002 or in 2026, counts equally in the average regardless of how long it has had to compound or how much money any individual subscriber........

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