Before the morning trading session, investors received positive information from the meeting of the State Securities Commission of Vietnam (SSC) last week. Specifically, at a meeting with 23 securities companies and market members, the SSC asked the stock exchanges to disclose information about the proprietary trading of securities companies.
Besides, the SSC also directed the Vietnam Securities Depository (VSD) to adjust the final settlement price of the VN30 index futures contract to be the average price of the last 30 minutes of the expiration date instead of the closing price of the ATC session to avoid the impact on the underlying market.
At the same time, the SSC also directed to put forward measures to soon raise Vietnam's stock market from frontier to emerging market as soon as possible.
The content of the meeting partly created optimism for investors when the number of selling orders at low prices dropped sharply while the demand was no longer hesitant to be pushed to the electric board. This positive change helped the electricity panel to be covered in green, and the VN-Index sometimes made a vertical increase of more than 33 points.
However, the market's movements changed rapidly in the afternoon trading session when the supply at low prices suddenly increased in the group of large-cap stocks. The sell-off of pillar stocks triggered a domino effect on the remaining ones.
The selling pressure caused the VN-Index to turn red gradually, then closed with a double-digit drop. Specifically, the benchmark closed with 10.82 points down, or 0.91 percent, to 1,171.95 points.
Although the VN-Index fell sharply, the number of gainers was slightly higher with 232 stocks in comparison with 224 losers and 45 unchanged stocks. The difference between gainers and losers was also more clearly in the VN30 group. Specifically, the number of losers was 11, while the number of stocks that increased and stood still was 16 and 3, respectively.
Noticeably, 11 losers in the VN30 basket had the presence of almost all the stocks that had a great impact on the index, such as BVH with a decrease of 5.5 percent, GAS with 5 percent, MSN with 6.9 percent, SAB with 3 percent, VIC with 1.3 percent, VNM with 0.5 percent, and VHM with 3.2 percent.
The fact that this group of key stocks was dragged down at the end of the trading session gave many investors another reason to doubt that the market was distorted because of derivatives trading.
The liquidity suddenly dropped compared to the previous session, with 584.3 million shares matched, worth VND14.57 trillion.
