Geraldine Weiss Dies at 96; Blazed a Trail for Women in Investing
Geraldine Weiss, who, after being told by a succession of stockbrokers that she was best qualified for the secretarial pool, devised an unconventional moneymaking strategy that she used in becoming the first woman to launch a successful investment newsletter, died on Monday at her home in the La Jolla area of San Diego. She was 96.
Her death was announced by her son Martin.
For more than a decade, Ms. Weiss wrote, edited and published her stock market newsletter, Investment Quality Trends, as G. Weiss to conceal her identity as a woman. It wasn’t until 1977 that she disclosed her full identity in an appearance on the PBS show “Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser.”
She soon became known as the grande dame of dividends. “She broke the glass ceiling,” said Kelley Wright, the current editor of Investment Quality Trends, who bought the newsletter from Ms. Weiss when she retired in 2002 at age 76.
A reasoned voice in a business riddled with self-promoters, Ms. Weiss grounded her twice-a-month advisories in company dividends instead of the intense analysis of corporate earnings, which has long been the dominant focus of Wall Street. She argued that dividends were the best gauge of performance, because they represented here-and-now cash not subject to subterfuge.
In “The Dividend Connection: How Dividends Create Value in the Stock Market,” the 1995 book she wrote with her son Gregory, Ms. Weiss explained that earnings can be “hidden or disguised behind vague bookkeeping terms such as cash flow, depreciation or inventory reserves” and distorted by taxes.
“A clever accountant,” she contended, “can make earnings appear good or not so good,” and companies that buy back their shares instead of paying dividends often overpay for them.
The newsletter’s record from the outset in 1966, and continuing Ms. Weiss’s method for recommendations after her retirement, was not flashy, but it was consistently rewarding. It produced an average annual stock market gain of 11.8 percent from 1986 to early 2022, including economic downturns, according to Mark J. Hulbert, founder of The Hulbert Financial Digest, a newsletter rating service, compared with an 11 percent gain, including dividends, for the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index, the broadest measure of the United States stock market.
Once a year, the service compiles a list of favorite stocks, which it dubs its Lucky 13. “It’s a method that works, has proven it has staying power and is simple,” Mr. Hulbert said, adding that the still-popular newsletter has one of the longest tenures in the business. “They make more money in the market, with less risk,,” he said.
Geraldine Sylvia Schmulowitz, known as Gerry, was born in San Francisco on March 16, 1926. Her father, Alvin, was a real estate agent; her mother, Sylvia, was a homemaker. Her father changed the family surname to Small after Geraldine faced antisemitism in school. “That was a big change in my life,” she said.
Geraldine was born into an extended family of avid investors whose conversations, which she absorbed, inspired her to study business and finance at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated in 1945.
She married a frequently reassigned naval officer, Richard A. Weiss, whom she met at a university dance during World War II. Abandoning her sputtering efforts at a career as a singer and songwriter, she created a graduate course in finance for herself.
“I read all the books on investing in the San Diego public library,” she said in an interview for this obituary in March. She was also influenced by the work of the famed value investor Benjamin Graham.
At age 40, with her four children mostly grown, she and a partner, Fred Whitmore, founded Investment Quality Trends. When Mr. Whitmore could not come up with the $5,000 needed for the fledgling business, Ms. Weiss bought him out and ran the newsletter herself for a cadre of increasingly loyal subscribers. For years she used a slide rule in her research; according to Mr. Wright, she regarded the pocket calculator as “the greatest invention of all time.”
Her newsletter’s dividend analysis begins by screening the stock universe for companies with the qualities that meet its definition of blue chips. (There are usually a few hundred of them, with histories of preferably uninterrupted dividend growth, large numbers of outstanding shares and institutional owners, a high Standard & Poor’s quality rating and a trend of rising profits.)
Each blue chip is then scrutinized individually in a search for patterns of dividend yields at critical peaks and valleys in the stock’s investment cycle. When its market price climbs to a point where the dividend yield sinks to its historic low, the newsletter considers it overvalued and recommends that the stock be sold. A low stock price that pushes a yield up signals a buy.
“Gerry’s approach was really unique,” Mr. Wright said, a combination of the two traditional ways to analyze securities: fundamental and technical. “Gerry was the first to meld the two,” he added.
Ms. Weiss’s dedication to her newsletter led to late hours and overnights at the office, but she also found time to play competitive bridge. She played into her 80s and 90s, her son Mark said, in an internet circle that included Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
Ms. Weiss retired in 2002, turning her business over to Mr. Wright for what Mark Weiss said was a six-figure sum. But she continued to closely monitor the advisory’s output. ” The market was her passion,” he said.
Richard Weiss died in 1994. Ms. Weiss’s sons Gabriel and Gregory also died before her. In addition to her son Martin, she is survived by her second husband, Michael Levine, whom she married in 2007; a daughter, Katherine Taylor; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
