Blue Chip

There is no committee that awards blue chip status and no threshold that confers it. It is a description people reach for when a company is big, old, widely held, and boring in the specific sense that its results rarely surprise anyone. The term comes from poker, where the blue chips carried the highest value.

Because the label is informal, two people can disagree about whether a given company qualifies, and both can be right. It carries no promise about the future: companies that were unarguably blue chip in one decade have shrunk, been broken up, or disappeared in the next, and the label did not protect them.

Where it is genuinely useful is as a shorthand for a set of characteristics that tend to travel together: a large market cap, wide analyst coverage, heavy daily volume, and often a dividend. Each of those is a fact you can look up, which is why they are the things worth checking rather than the label.