This month, we have an article from AAII’s president, John Bajkowski. It’s a companion to an article written by yours truly in the June AAII Journal, “The Weiss Approach to Value in Blue-Chip Stocks.”

In the wise words of Geraldine Weiss, “An enlightened investor, one who can recognize value and quality, will survive in virtually any investment climate.” Weiss gave reasoning behind this statement in her book “Dividends Don’t Lie,” (Longman Publishing, 1988) co-authored by Janet Lowe.

Her approach focuses on the dividend yield as a means of valuation. Using the dividend yield as her guide, Weiss sought “blue-chip” companies with sound financial statements at a reasonable price. The methodology outlined in “Dividends Don’t Lie” served as a game plan for Weiss’ investment advisory newsletter, Investment Quality Trends and is still widely followed today (Investment Quality Trends is now run by Kelley Wright).

Bajkowski’s article “Implementing the Weiss Blue-Chip Screen” takes a deeper dive into Weiss’s approach by outlining specific screening criteria to use when implementing the blue-chip dividend approach as a stock screen. He uses AAII’s Stock Investor Pro to illustrate the process.

This month’s CI also contains an overview article of a new cloud-based stock screening and backtesting software called SynVero, written by SynVero CEO and founder Kenn Pennington.

Lastly, this month edition’s comes with updates to CI’s Best of the Web column. Three categories in the Stocks section of the guide are updated: fundamental stock data, charting and technical analysis, and conference calls and corporate events.

While going through the possible Best of the Web candidates for this month, we found that fewer and fewer websites provide solid conference call and corporate event transcripts. Aside from the websites mentioned in our guide, I recommend that you utilize specific companies’ investor relations websites. Most companies keep an archive of earnings conference calls, investor day presentations and links to presentations from conferences that they’ve recently attended. Best of all, this data is free.

As always, we welcome recommendations for websites or services to cover in the Best of the Web or elsewhere in CI. If you have any ideas, please email us at CI@aaii.com.