How true is the saying “no pain, no gain”? Very true indeed, if you’re Prapas Tonpibulsak.
The chief investment officer of Ayudhya Fund Management says he learned his fair share at the schools he attended, but none offered him the sorts of lessons _ not all of them pleasant _ that the Stock Exchange of Thailand has given him.
As a teenager in Chumphon, the Southern Province in Thailand, he was like many of his peers, with limited awareness of events happening around him. Even when he first arrived in Bangkok to study finance and banking at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, he found life fairly convenient; his goals were indeterminate.
That soon changed. As a senior student, he started to become curious about what he’d been reading about the stock market. He started to get ideas. Just two weeks before the 1987 Black Monday, he borrowed his parents’ money and put it all in the stock market. The outcome: he kissed all the money goodbye.
“Well, if you ask how much money I lost back then, I would say the value equal to four Mercedes-Benzes, guidemoney.info/Mercedes-Benzes.htm ” he says with a...