Dividends Still Don't Lie: The Truth About Investing in Blue Chip Stocks and Winning in the Stock Market

Introduction

Life is the best teacher, boy." This was my grandfather's way of saying that the best education is experiential. I am confident he arrived at this knowledge honestly; I know that I did.

I know this to be true as the result of almost three decades of experience as both an advisor and private investor. Experience means you have lost money in the markets, survived, and learned how to invest better. Rest assured that I have a lot of experience.

In 1988, my mentor and predecessor Geraldine Weiss wrote the classic Dividends Don't Lie. That book detailed the dividend-value strategy behind Investment Quality Trends, the highly successful newsletter Geraldine founded and that I now have the privilege to edit. Twenty-two years hence, the investment world has changed dramatically because of computer technology and the Internet. Tremendous amounts of data and information can be gathered, sorted, and analyzed in a matter of minutes. What used to take weeks or months at a library can now be accomplished in an evening; all one needs is a computer and Internet access.

What hasn't changed is the success of the dividend-value strategy for producing consistent gains in the stock market. Despite the advent of new technologies and the ability of investors to access information on an unprecedented basis, our old-school technique of using the dividend yield to identify values in blue chip stocks still outperforms most investment methods on a risk-adjusted basis.

Forty-four years after its inception, ...