Government rules out increase in stock market trading lot to 1,000

The IT giant has offered a "feasible" solution to address the overload at the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HoSE) within three or four months, Minister of Finance Dinh Tien Dung said at a meeting on Tuesday.

In the meantime, his ministry is encouraging companies to voluntarily move their stocks temporarily from HoSE to the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX) to reduce the number of orders in the former’s system.

HoSE’s system, which has mostly remained unchanged in the last 20 years, has been overwhelmed after a huge number of new investors began trading in recent months. Many complain about the trouble they have placing buy orders, especially in the afternoon when volumes rise.

The bourse can handle a maximum of 900,000 transactions a day.

Increasing the minimum trading lot from 100 shares to 1,000 was one of several solutions proposed by HoSE to deal with the congestion in recent months after the number of trading accounts surged, which has irked investors and administrators.

The bourse is upgrading at a cost of $30 million, but the Covid-19 pandemic is delaying the work, which will not be completed at least until year end.

FPT chairman Truong Gia Binh had last week asked the government if private companies could help fix the problem.

Duong Dung Trieu, chairman of FPT Information System, an IT solutions subsidiary, said his company is considering developing an alternate system to host HoSE’s transactions until it installs a new system from South Korea.

FPT is capable of providing a safe solution for the problem since it has over 20 years of developing software for the stock market, he pointed out.

In the early 2000s, FPT was providing support solutions for the HoSE system provided by Thailand, which remains in use.

It also developed a trading system for the HNX in 2004, the Unlisted Public Company Market in 2009 and the government bond market in 2012.

It continues to provide solutions to the HNX and the Vietnam Securities Depository.

Vietnam had 2.88 million domestic stock trading accounts at the end of February, 21 percent up from a year earlier and equivalent to 2.96 percent of its population. Last year the ratio of HoSE’s total market cap to GDP was 67.59 percent.