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Geraldine Weiss is one of the most successful dividend investors in history.
She outperformed the S&P 500 for nearly 4 decades.
Let’s break down the secrets behind her success.
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Who is Geraldine Weiss?
Geraldine Weiss was also known as the Grande Dame of Dividends and the Dividend Detective.
She’s famous for a simple idea…
…dividends show us what a company is really worth.
Geraldine was born in 1926 in San Francisco.
She discovered investing through Benjamin Graham’s books Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor.
In 1945 She graduated from University of California with a degree in business and finance.
When she started looking for a job she found that Wall Street did not welcome her.
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It was 1962 and firms were rejecting her simply because she was a woman.
So in 1966, at age 40, she launched her own newsletter, Investment Quality Trends.
She signed it G. Weiss, letting readers assume she was a man.
And it worked. Investment Quality Trends (IQT) got noticed.
Even in bear markets, IQT was making double-digit returns.
In 1977, she revealed her identity on Wall Street Week.
This time nobody cared.
Subscribers were making too much money.
She later wrote Dividends Don’t Lie, a classic in dividend investing, and co authored The Dividend Connection.
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In this book she explains how she identified undervalued stocks using Dividend yield.
Dividend Yield is a ratio that measures the annual dividend income an investor can expect from a stock relative to its current market price
Dividend Yield = Dividend per Share / Stock price
Geraldine passed away in 2022 at the age of 96.
Her legacy continues to lives on through disciplined dividend investing.
Investment Philosophy
The Geraldine Weiss approach can be summarized as follows:
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To achieve this, she always used three core principles:
Always demand a bird in the hand
Do your homework
Be patient
1. Always Demand a Bird in the Hand
The best investments happen when you can receive cash income (dividend payments) from undervalued companies.<