Sudden difficult times can bring positive changes, besides unusal opportunties.
What lots of foreign fund managers forget or don't understand is that April is a time of the year where not much gets done anyway here. Its the traditional big holiday Thai new Year time, and most of the country closes down. Try to get anything done in Thailand any year in April, and you will be frustrated. Its the school summer holidays as well, so all at once. April is the hottest month of the year and people/factories/business just close down. Hence this lock-down period now is hardly as disruptive as it looks to outsiders, or as it is in other countries.
Not to downplay the misery and seriousness of it all, but fact is it could have not come at a better time. Thai's will use this period to clean up, catch up, spend time with the family and do some things they never otherwise had or took time for, including reflecting and appreciating what life they had before, only to return to some normalcy soon. In recent years there has been an abundance on overbuilding of hotel rooms I call it a glut, many by foreign money, besides overzealous tourist biz., to no end. This created chock points, pollution of various kinds, crowding, stress and huge traffic jams not least on tourist buses & vans. Much of the beautiful Thai nature got a break to restore! Even while many good people are suffering to some degree or others, this cleansing and shake-up out of nowhere, created a wake-up call which has some silver linings. Also, the Thai broker industry needed some shake-up and a pruning, and they at last got it. Presently there is no better period to now pick up oversold inexpensive Thai stocks, as I know some.
Paul A. Renaud. www.thaistocks.com