Size isn’t what mat­ters (mostly). When most con­sider stock mar­ket per­for­mance, they focus on the size of the port­fo­lio. The size of the invest­ment. It’s really not the only thing that mat­ters. In my opin­ion, it’s not even the thing that mat­ters most for the mod­est indi­vid­ual investor. Div­i­dend per­for­mance and the result­ing income you receive from your port­fo­lio is a crit­i­cal per­spec­tive to take as a long-term investor. Let me share an exam­ple. The Wall Street Jour­nal wrote an arti­cle yes­ter­day com­par­ing the stock mar­ket per­for­mance returns of Microsoft and Apple for the past 10 years. Had you invested $10,000 in each 10 years ago, you’d have about $13,000 in Microsoft today but $700,000 in Apple. I saw the arti­cle late at night and…