Geraldine Weiss "the Grande Dame of Dividends"

Geraldine Weiss was a trailblazer in the world of investing and sadly passed away recently at the age of 96 in April 2022. She was one of the first investors to rather focus on dividend yield and dividend growth instead of earnings. This also led to her apt nickname "the Grande Dame of Dividends". Impressively, she has also published two books Dividends Don't Lie: Finding Value in Blue-chip Stocks and The Dividend Connection: How Dividends Create Value in the Stock Market.

Geraldine initially tried to enter the field of investments in the early 1960s as an analyst, but failed to do so given the prevailing gender discrimination at the the time. So, at the age of 40, she started her own investment newsletter "Quality Trends" in 1966.

Weiss screened stocks looking at the following criteria:

1. Whether the dividend yield is undervalued on a historical basis

2. Whether the company has raised dividends at an annual compound rate of at least 10% in the past 12 years

3. Whether the company is trading at a book value (BV) of two or less

4. Whether the company has a P/E ratio of 20-to-1 or less

5. Whether the dividend payout ratio is 50% or less

6. Whether the debt is 50% or less of the company's total market capitalization

7. Whether it meets the six blue chip criteria: (1) Dividends have been raised at least 5 times in the last 12 years, (2) has at least an "A" rating from S&P, (3) has at least 5 million shares outstanding, (4) has at least 80 institutional investors that hold the stock, (5) has at least 25 years of consistent dividends, and (6) has shown earnings improvement at least seven times in the last 12 years.

https://www.forbes.com/2002/02/12/0212adviser.html?sh=72e528c03dbd

Using her strategy and sticking to roughly 10-20 stocks has led to outperformance in the last 30 years. 

"For the last 30 years, the IQT's top recommendations have returned 11.2% a year, compared with 9.8% for the overall market. It has consistently been rated one of the best-performing newsletters by services that monitor the performance of tipsheets. IQT's tips collectively exhibit around 15% less volatility than the market, so the outperformance is even higher than the raw stats would suggest."  ~

https://moneyweek.com/475126/the-worlds-greatest-investors-5?amp

You can also listen to a recent podcast, explaining her proven strategy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gel_XbDBJ7Y