Liquidity down on Vietnam’s main stock exchange

By Phuong Dong July 16, 2019 | 11:19 pm PT

An investor watches stock prices at a brokerage office in Hanoi. Photo by AFP.

Average daily transactions on the HCMC stock market in H1 this year were down 14.6 percent by volume and 29.5 percent by value.

Official statistics from the HCMC Stock Exchange (HoSE) show an average of 172.3 million shares were traded daily for an average of VND3.93 trillion ($169.27 million) in the first six months of 2019.

Foreign investors brought in VND10.1 trillion ($435.02 million) during the period and accounted for over 38 percent of trading. In the first half of the year, HoSE saw 5 new stocks listing on the exchange, adding around VND70 trillion ($3 billion) to the stock market's capitalization.

At the end of the first half, 377 stocks were listed on the exchange with a total market cap of VND3.2 quadrillion ($137.8 billion), an increase of 11 percent from a year earlier.

HoSE is Vietnam's main bourse, accounting for around 90 percent of the market cap of all listed stocks.

Vietnam's other two exchanges are the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX), mainly for smaller listed public companies, and the UPCoM, which seeks to attract unlisted public firms to the securities market.