Opinion

Today we are going to do a deeper dive on a comment from one of our previous columns. It is the idea of mastering a skill. You may have heard the saying that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. This claim is fairly abstract, but I bet you can agree that it is at least close to being true. Think about it, if you work your 40 hour per week job for just under five years, you will have mastered the task. Funny enough, you can earn a master’s degree in college in a little over five years so it would seem to ring true in higher education as well. However, I am not talking about college or higher education. We are talking about real world application. If you apply yourself to serious study and practice, should it take you about 10,000 hours to master anything?

Well, Good Friday is here, and Easter is just a couple days away. Growing up, I always enjoyed Easter, maybe not as much as a couple of the other holidays, but I enjoyed it. I think anyone who has ever attended a church service on Easter Sunday can remember the song, He Arose. I bet, you’re singing it now and it will be in your head all day. You are welcome.

I’ve been a bit haunted lately at my Sand Hill home. Something dark and eerie has appeared there in large numbers.

“BEAT NUT HILL, BEAT NUT HILL! This was the war cry in the mid to late 1960’s that marked the rivalry between Walnut Ridge (Nut Hill) and Pocahontas (or Squaw Town, as they called us). This story will revolve around one player, Jim Earley, an All-District Football player in 1964-65 and 66.

My daily routine usually begins with me stopping by the Star Herald to catch up. My Dad would always stop by the local radio station in Mountain Home to see what news broke overnight, catch up on the Bombers, see his cousin Jim, the news director, and visit about everything and nothing. I guess I have inherited this trait.

Unable to come up with a timely or engaging topic, I am falling back on backwoods sayings of the Upland South. Much of what will be included was common in my youth but rarely heard in 2022 conversation.

CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK When we finally had made it to Hemingway’s House, it was spectacular, the gardens surrounding it were lushly filled with flowers, trees, shrubs in such mass the house was shut in and somewhat cloistered from the noisy streets beyond, there were mazes of walkways around the grounds, leading here and there, a two-story white building behind the house where Hemingway’s study was located upstairs, there were steps going up from either side to a very small porch like landing with a doorway entrance where you could stand and look into the room. I fell in love with the house the tall strange not (lemony) rather a limeony colored shutters framing the doors and windows all of which were each arched at the top and gorgeous, the house was of stucco and painted a much lighter version of the same limeony color, the upstairs veranda encased all in black wrought iron, it was a dream to behold, I could imagine the Hemingways sitting out evenings on the upstairs veranda, enjoying their beautiful surrounding with the scent of flowers in the air, having cool drinks.

It has been said that to make money investing, you do not need a good plan, you just need a plan. There are many philosophies on investment analysis and the above statement gives a wide berth to anyone who wants to focus their efforts on studying the markets for viable investments and building a strategy to that works for them. Analysis may take on many forms under two major headings, one is called Fundamental Analysis and the other is called Technical Analysis. Fundamental Analysis is the study of the company’s financial statements, management, sector, and industry. All by the numbers. No nuance with little abstraction. Conversely, Technically Analysis is much more abstract, studying patterns and psychology to reveal patterns and project future probabilities. Most investors choose to subscribe to only one of these methods under the worry that the information will become overwhelming and cause the practitioner to suffer from “paralysis by analysis”. However, I personally believe that IF, we as investors, can build a sound model of efficiency in our research, then we can open ourselves up to the more useful information of conducting both fundamental and technical research.

Today we are going to discuss stock splits. Once a very lucrative maneuver by larger companies, stock splits have become less popular over the years, taking a back seat to stock repurchase programs. Regardless of their popularity, stock splits are still common enough to discuss and plan around.