The Vietnamese stock market has experienced a volatile trading week after a period of strong gains. In that context, foreign investors continue to be a major minus point as net selling pressure has not shown signs of cooling down, with a net selling value of more than 6,200 billion VND, an increase of nearly 60% compared to the previous week.
On the HOSE floor alone, foreign investors net sold in 5 sessions. In total, foreign investors net sold 265.6 million units, the total net selling value correspondingly reached more than 6,220.2 billion VND, a sharp increase of 205.6% in volume and 60.9% in value compared to the previous week.
On the HNX exchange, foreign investors net bought for 1 session and net sold for 4 sessions.In total, in the week, foreign investors net sold 1.16 million units, total net selling value reached 133.5 billion VND, down 42.56% in volume but up 225.35% in value compared to the previous week.
The focus in the net selling story of foreign investors in the past week was the banking stock group that was heavily sold.Meanwhile, MSB stock with a volume of nearly 104.5 million units, the corresponding net selling value reached 1,391.2 billion VND.
Followed by other members of the banking industry including ACB being net sold 603 billion VND (approximately 23 million units) and MBB being net sold 602 billion VND (30.88 million units).
Thus, from the beginning of May to now, foreign investors have had 3 consecutive weeks of net selling with a value of more than 16,000 billion VND. Previously, in the first 4 months of 2026, the net selling scale of foreign investors reached about 43.6 trillion VND.
In other words, the upward score level in the past time was mainly supported by domestic cash flow, while foreign capital has not yet sent out a clear reversal signal. This shows that the capital allocation decision of international investors is significantly affected by broader variables, going beyond the simple score diễn biến.
The capital withdrawal does not reflect the weakening of Vietnam's macroeconomy but mainly stems from global fluctuations. Currently, the yield of 30-year US bonds has exceeded the peak of 2008. Meanwhile, the yield of 10-year Japanese bonds has also exceeded 2%, which makes the strategy of borrowing cheap capital in Yen to invest in emerging and frontier markets no longer attractive, forcing capital to return to developed markets. Not only Vietnam, many other emerging and frontier markets are also under similar capital withdrawal pressure.
On the market front, experts believe that the reason still lies in the fact that Vietnam is in the structural transformation phase but has not completed the process of improving the quality of goods. The market has significantly improved in scale, but the number of large technology enterprises, green enterprises, enterprises with sufficiently deep information disclosure and governance standards to attract long-term institutional fund groups is still not large.
The lack of new growth stories that are attractive at the regional level gives foreign investors more reason to be more selective in capital allocation, especially when they have many competitive options in the same Asian region.
Currently, Vietnam is only ranked in the secondary emerging market group of FTSE Russell - the lowest level in the emerging market group. A larger goal is that in the period 2026 - 2028, it will step into the emerging portfolio of MSCI - an index organization based in the US and an important reference for many global investment funds with very large asset scale.
If MSCI upgrades, experts predict Vietnam will attract a significant amount of foreign capital.In addition to the upgrade story, IPO and listing activities (including equitization of state-owned enterprises) will also be a major driving force for the market in the coming period.According to forecasts, in the period 2026 - 2028, the Vietnamese stock market may add about 50 billion USD of new capitalization value.
