Retired young,While I'm obviously biased, you own an impressive...

Retired young,

While I'm obviously biased, you own an impressive line-up of businesses. Certainly, it is very out-of-character an assembly of stocks for most HotCopper-ites.

Plenty of surplus capital generation there!

Can I ask how you come to select companies you want to own?

As for your comments about my apparent dislike of telecommunications companies: I actually did own TLS from the heart of the GFC (sub-$2.80 levels, when the stock was yielding almost 10% fully franked and the herd of telco analysts were calling for the sky to fall on the PSTN business).

I sold it in 2012 for an average price of around $3.80/share, believing it to be fully valued, at a P/E of 13.5x, and at the time the European debt wobbles were throwing up what I thought were more attractive opportunities, so TLs became a funding source. Looking back, I think I failed to appreciate just how acute the quest for yield was to become.

But I have to admit that I have shied away from investing in telecommunications historically. Reason being is that I believe one should always steer clear of things you don’t understand, and I don’t have the sort of background and experience that allows me to keep abreast of the rapid rate of technological change that is clearly a permanent feature of the telco landscape.

I've looked at MTU a few times, and concluded - wrongly, I think with hindsight - that it was little more than an acquisition roll-out story.

And because I didn't know what a DSLAM was, I couldn't invest in IIN.

I’m always afraid that some tectonic shift in technology is going to come out of left field and torpedo my business while I plod along, blissfully naive and unaware!

I mean, until recently I thought Blackberry was the greatest thing ever, and now I read the company is basically going to the wall.

(I used one of those old Nokia 3310 phones until as recently as about two years ago, and then it got wet and broke...otherwise I’d still have it today. Then someone lent me a Blackberry for a year and I thought I was really hip, before some of its buttons broke. I’ve had an I-phone for less than a year. And all I use it for is to phone people.)

And don’t get me started on the i-Cloud, whatever that is.

Clearly, I am unqualified to get too involved in anything technological...it’s a field that simply moves too fast for me.

I know I’d get my bum handed to me on a plate if I tried investing in the sector.

It is very valuable, when investing, to know the limits of one’s competency, and I am like the Homer Simpson of the IT field.