She Actually Beat Wall Street By Ignoring Earnings Entirely

March is Women’s History Month, a time set aside to reflect on the women who pushed boundaries long before many of the opportunities we have today existed. In finance, those stories are not ancient history. Many of the women who opened the doors to this profession were working only a generation ago.

In 2015, I traveled to New York City to accept the Charles H. Dow Award for a paper I had written the previous year. At the time, it did not occur to me that I was the first woman to win the award as a sole author in the award’s 21-year history. 

The event looked exactly like you might imagine. The room was filled mostly with older men in suits. A few women were scattered around the edges. Naturally, I gravitated toward them.

The first woman I introduced myself to was Louise Yamada, a legendary technical analyst who retired after a long career at Smith Barney. I also met Bernadette Murphy, whom many investors remember as one of the “elves” on Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser, on which she appeared for more than two decades.

As the evening went on, I realized that many of the women in the room had something in common: they were pioneers.

When they began their careers, there were very few women on Wall Street. They faced significant challenges, and yet they persevered.Their determination helped open doors that had previously been closed.

Wall Street in those days was famously clubby. Being someone’s nephew was often enough to get hired. Women rarely received that same benefit of the doubt. To succeed—or even just to be taken seriously—they had to know more and work harder than anyone.

The conversations I had that night have stayed with me over the years, and came back to mind a few years ago when I read that Geraldine Weiss had passed away. Her name came up repeatedly during those conversations in New York, and for good reason.

Geraldine built an extraordinary career as an investment advisor and newsletter writer. But one of the most remarkable details of her story is that she hid her identity for the first decade of her career. Her newsletter was published under the name “G. Weiss.” Only in 1976 did she reveal herself publicly during an appearance on Wall Street Week.

It is remarkable to realize that this happened within our lifetimes.

Beyond the barriers she faced, what inspired me most about Geraldine Weiss was that she developed her own indicator to address a major problem with earnings.

Geraldine’s New York Times obituary quoted her as saying “a clever accountant can make earnings appear good or not so good” by using “vague bookkeeping terms such as cash flow, depreciation, or inventory resources.”

This should sound familiar—after all, companies still use underhanded tactics to manipulate earnings. Just last month, the SEC penalized a company for increasing earnings per share by $0.01 to meet Wall Street estimates.

So instead of looking at self-issued reports, Geraldine’s approach focused on dividend yield. She believed dividends were the most reliable fundamental measure of a company’s profitability because earnings could be manipulated through accounting choices. This kept the vague bookkeeping terms she decried out of her investment equation. 

Many of Geraldine’s insights still hold true today.

Companies frequently repurchase shares rather than paying dividends, and they sometimes do so at prices that seem far from a bargain. Accounting has also grown more complex. In fact, many companies now release two versions of their earnings: one based on official accounting rules and another “adjusted” version that removes certain items. Investors and analysts often focus on the adjusted number, even though management decides what to exclude.

Geraldine Weiss understood decades ago that financial statements require interpretation.

While I agree that dividends offer information that earnings alone cannot provide, I take a slightly different view of what matters most in markets. In my work, price is the ultimate truth. Earnings can be adjusted. Forecasts can be revised. Narratives can change.

But price reflects what buyers and sellers agree a stock is worth at a given moment.

Inspired by that idea, I spent years studying price behavior and developing indicators designed to identify when trends are reversing. That work eventually led to the research that earned my Dow Award.

And thanks to women like Geraldine Weiss, Louise Yamada, and Bernadette Murphy, I never had to hide who I was to do that work. Their generation pushed open doors that had been closed for decades. Because of them, I can build a career in a field that would have been almost impossible for my grandmother to enter.

This is the legacy worth remembering during Women’s History Month. Progress did not happen all at once. It happened because determined women kept showing up, doing the work, and proving they belonged in rooms where they were not always expected.

Every time I sit down to study a chart or develop a new indicator, I am reminded that this opportunity exists because earlier pioneers believed the markets should be open to anyone willing to do the work.