The Vietnamese stock market started February with a difficult trading week in the context of negative psychology covering the global financial market. The fact that VN-Index lost the psychological threshold of 1,800 points has led to a clear decline in short-term expectations, triggering a deeper and wider correction.
Along with that, the fact that foreign investors continuously maintain net selling status on a significant scale further increases supply pressure, making the market picture even more gloomy. The net selling pressure of foreign investors is increasing in the banking and securities stock groups and then spreading to many other industry groups, causing the index to continue to bear downward pressure and lose the hard support level of 1,780 in the last trading session of the week.
Accumulated after 5 sessions, foreign investors net sold 6. 112 billion VND across the market. For each exchange alone, foreign investors net sold 6. 215 billion VND on HoSE, net bought 113 billion VND on HNX and net sold 10 billion VND on the UPCoM exchange.
At the end of the past trading week, VN-Index decreased by a total of 73.55 points in the past week, stopping at the threshold of 1,755.49 points. Regarding the level of impact, VCB was the stock that put the most pressure in the last session of the week when it took away 5.65 points of VN-Index. Followed by CTG, HPG, VPL, HDB and VPB also pulled the index down by another 6.4 points. In the opposite direction, only GAS, VIC and GEL contributed significantly, holding back more than 4 points for VN-Index.
Red color covered most industry groups, of which 5 out of 11 groups recorded a sharp decrease of over 2%. Media services are the "bottom" group of the market with a decrease of 7.23%, affected by deep adjustments. Two large-cap groups, industry and finance, also put significant pressure when a series of codes decreased by over 2%.
According to experts, the Vietnamese stock market is facing a strategic "turning point" when entering February, where the intersection between traditional seasonality and structural changes of a market transitioning to "Emerging" will create interesting movements.
While individual investors often tend to reduce margin ratios to manage risks and finalize finances before the Lunar New Year holiday (which often leads to liquidity decline in the 10 sessions before Tet), foreign investors and domestic organizations take advantage of this information "low" period to accumulate positions. Historical data from the past 10 years (2016 - 2025) with a very high probability of increasing points before Tet is proof of this phenomenon of "buying in skepticism".
The analysis team of VNDirect Securities Company forecasts that VN-Index is likely to continue to face adjustment pressure in the short term, in the context of increased profit-taking activities and weakening cash flow in the trading sessions close to the Lunar New Year holiday.
VN-Index may retreat to test the support zone around 1,766 points (±10 points) to absorb the remaining low-price supply, before gradually recovering and returning to the resistance zone of 1,940 points.
The strategy to prioritize in this period according to VNDirect is to proactively restructure the portfolio, selecting businesses with good fundamentals and benefiting from policy changes to anticipate a new growth cycle. At the same time, investors need to pay attention to risk management through margin control at a safe level as well as restructuring inefficient positions.
Kafi Securities Company's analysts still expect an upward scenario in Q1/2026, however, the leading stocks in 2025 may stagnate, giving way to the group of stocks with good foundations but not increasing much, creating a slightly upward market picture but still showing outstanding profit opportunities.
In addition, the movement of foreign investors after Tet is also very promising. The event of FTSE Russell announcing the revaluation results for the Vietnamese market at the end of March - early April will be a driving force to activate short-term cash flow, as well as foreign investors' cash flow.
