In the last trading week of July, although there were sessions of strongly slowing down net selling and switching to net buying status, foreign investors still net sold more than 2,500 billion VND with the focus being VHM stock.
On the HOSE exchange, foreign investors net sold for 4 sessions and net bought for 1 session. In total, foreign investors net sold 70.5 million units, with a total net selling value of 2,438.7 billion VND, down 47% in volume and down 29.1% in value compared to the previous week.
On the HNX exchange, foreign investors net sold in 5 sessions. In total, in the week, foreign investors net sold 4.73 million units, the total net selling value correspondingly reached 101.7 billion VND, an increase of 191.9% in volume and 44.7% in value compared to the previous week.
In the past week, VIC was the stock with the strongest net buying with a value of VND 453 billion, equivalent to a corresponding net buying volume of 2.1 million units. Followed by VNM being net bought VND 361 billion (more than 6 million units) and HPG being net bought VND 335 billion (nearly 16.1 million units).
In the opposite direction, VHM stock was also the stock with the strongest net selling with a volume of more than 26.1 million units, the corresponding net selling value reached 3,291 billion VND.
The fact that foreign investors continue to withdraw capital is no longer a surprise development, because this trend has lasted for the past few years. Accumulated in the first half of the year, foreign investors net sold more than 80 trillion VND. Analysts also do not expect much from the scenario of foreign investors soon net buying again.
The proportion of foreign investors' transactions across the market has decreased to 11.9%, compared to 13.5% in 2025, showing that the impact on liquidity continues to decline, while domestic investors still maintain a dominant role.
However, experts still highly appreciate the balance coming from the buying force of domestic investors. Despite the selling pressure of foreign investors, the buying side still absorbed it and continuously pulled the VN-Index to surpass the old peak in 2025, as well as establish a new peak level in 2026. Domestic cash flow is still strong enough to support market liquidity, but that does not mean that the role of foreign capital decreases.
The return of foreign capital is also considered a "measure of confidence" for the market. This is a very important factor in the process of upgrading and developing the depth of the Vietnamese capital market in the long term.
Dr. Nguyen Duy Phuong, Director of Financial Investment Analysis Division of DG Capital, said that it is unlikely that foreign investors will return to strong and widespread net buying in the next 1-3 months, but it is not yet "absent" for a long time. Instead, foreign investors are likely to gradually shift to slower net selling, selective net buying, and then officially net buying systematically.
Experts recommend that investors need to determine that market upgrades are a long-term story. Vietnamese stocks will be added to FTSE GEIS and related indices through a phasing implementation process of 4 phases, starting from September 2026 and ending in September 2027.
According to DG Capital's assessment, in phase 1 in September 2026, with a disbursement rate of 10%, this is a test phase. The 10% ratio is small enough not to shock the market, and at the same time is an opportunity for foreign funds to verify the smoothness of the trading system, especially the non-prefunding (NPF) mechanism of Vietnam.
Phase 2 will start from March 2027 with a rate of 20% and gradually increase the disbursement proportion, raising the total level to 30%.
By phases 3 and 4 (June 2027 and September 2027), the disbursement rate for each phase is 35%, this is the tipping point of the macro cash flow.70% of the target capital volume will be concentrated in the 2 quarters of mid-2027.
This shows that the explosion of passive cash flow will not happen immediately on the first day of upgrade, but will take nearly a year afterwards.
Besides, there are expectations that Vietnam will be added to MSCI's Watchlist in the period 2026-2027.This will be a psychological boost to attract capital flows from foreign investors back to the Vietnamese stock market.
