Wake-up call on Thai individual stock investing trends.
Some more reasons why I have decided to move-on, by focussing on what is working for years already.
When I in person visited Khun Rapee, the Assistant Secretary of the SEC last August 11 "04, he clearly told me among other things that their view is "most individuals here should not be in the market to beginn with".
The feeling was/is that most local retail investors simply lack the proper view, attitude and investor education and so would just trade/gamble their savings away. Hence, they should not be active in the SET to begin with and so this should not be promoted. Instead, the proper way for most Thai’s is to channel their savings into various Mutual Funds. A sector he predicted would show tremendous growth over the next 3-5 years. That is his firm opinion -and I sensed it was broad based among the senior regulators, not just Khun Rapee. While this was not mentioned, I also sensed he agreed that Thai brokers were not ready, nor willing, to re-invent themselves by empowering & educating individual investors to get the right stock market investing view.
In fact, this is consisted with my impression on the lack of SET efforts, regarding individual investing. I visited in person various SET advisors & officials a year ago. There was/is no real meaningful plan or effort to educate, change or indulge new investors to long term investing. The only real "distant punch" on that front was the introduction to all Thai High school students on SET long term investing practices. There is a neat Thai SET investing textbook required reading for High School students. The plan is to hopefully gear the next generation, to proper long term stock market investing. I for one could not see any meaningful steps or initiatives taken by the authorities in the interim. In the interim, individuals are supposed to buy Funds, not individual stocks.
Then, last week the MD of Kim Eng (Khun Montree), the largest of all Thai brokers, was interviewed by various local press journalists, as was amply here reported. In this interview Khun Montree firmly predicted that the growth of SET share volume and trading in years to come will be derived primarily from two main sources: 1) institutional investors and 2) foreign investors. No mention at all regarding individual investors. This is a bold prediction as individuals currently make up a dominant portion of daily volume.
Today, it is crystal clear to me that while a few hundred (I estimate this to be 300 to 500) alert individuals have long caught on that there are tremendous value based investment opportunities to be had on the SET and this for years already. Most others (estimated to be 30,000 to 40,000 trading accounts) are just stuck in the pervasive (but wrong) view that short term trading is the only "name of the game" on the local stock exchange. Then there are many hundreds of thousands of qualified & substantial savers which avoid the SET altogether because of its dire casino reputation.
The conclusions are obvious: there remain tremendous investment opportunities for individual investors on the SET, as the mega & growing institutions ever more distort the valuation grid. (Most of these for example totally missed out on Ticon so far). But these great wealth creating SET opportunities are not to be confused with number of potential memberships to thaistocks.com. Clearly this is not a large number as we here found out, -and it is not growing. There are simply far too few individuals which have caught-on and the press has done a lousy job under-reporting on this.
And so the Ts.com membership business is not a growth business, but wealth creating opportunities remain so. The reality is that most all have still not gotten the message and there is not much hope at all that many more will in the near to medium term. Superb wealth creating opportunities are fairly regularly to be had on the SET if you look beyond the institutional favorites, but this is not to be confused with the Ts.com membership business.
I for one am content of having shared my insights on this for many years with our members and visitors, but trying to wake-up the many misinformed individuals is no longer a deserved cause here. Moving-on and focusing solely on the "real honey"; as it is clear to me the vast majority (nor the local or international press, nor the SET or SEC) are not ready at all to catch-on or to explain the same consistent message and results delivered if you look beyond the top SET 50. Heck, there still is no alternate index which shows movement, say ex-top SET 50. So as they say, I will just bake my own cake.
Best Regards,
Paul A. Renaud.
www.thaistocks.com
