THE STORY

Geraldine Weiss, born in San Francisco in 1926, is the co-founder of Investment Quality Trends, and she is widely regarded as one of the most successful and influential female investors in a traditionally male-dominated profession.

She was also nicknamed ‘The Dividend Detective’ for her unconventional approach towards investing and picking winners. In a nutshell, her strategy was to buy the top dividend paying shares and sell them when the dividends hit historical lows. According to Weiss, companies could ‘cheat’ when it came to profits and revenues but not as far as dividend payouts were concerned. Weiss identified seven key criteria that should be considered by investors before buying a stock, with the majority linked to dividends in some way. These became her mental checklist that she would always refer back to when trying to spot winners. One of her most successful tips was Coca Cola, which returned an average of 34.6% a year between 1982 and 1992, compared with 18.6% for the stock market as a whole.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Geraldine Weiss provides us with three tips for becoming a great Detective:

Have a very clear picture in your mind of what a good hypothesis or idea looks like and establish a number of key criteria that support this view.

Cement this checklist in your sub-conscious so that you can spot the potential in opportunities more readily and more easily. It will act as your internal filter or screen.

Make sure you discipline yourself to always use this checklist as your filtering mechanism. Like all muscles, the more you use it, the stronger your intuition muscle will become.

YOUR CHALLENGE

1. Pick a task or a project that requires you to identify some new ideas.

2. Establish a set of criteria that will help you decide whether an idea has potential or not. Write this list down.

3. Whenever you think of a new idea, use the checklist to assess its potential. Remember, the more you do this, the more automatic and intuitive it will become.