The movement of foreign capital flows in the stock market is still going against analysts' forecasts when net selling is still large.
According to statistics, in just the first two months of 2025, the net selling value of foreign investors (foreign investors) has exceeded VND 16,600 billion, equivalent to more than 630 million USD. The selling momentum of foreign investors is widespread, mainly focusing on the Bluechips group.
Typically, FPT code leads the net selling scale when it is net disbursed nearly VND 2,900 billion after only 2 trading months in early 2025. Another stock that was also net sold strongly was VIC, which recorded a net sale of nearly VND 2,000 billion since the beginning of the year.
Vinamilk's VNM shares also entered the top of the list of strong net sellers in the first period of 2025 with a value of more than VND 1,410 billion. In addition, stocks such as VCB (Vietcombank), MSN (Masan), FRT (FPT Retail) or SSI ( SSI Securities) recorded a net selling value of over 850 billion VND in the past 2 months.
Looking back at the pressure of foreign capital flows in 2024, there has been an unprecedented net withdrawal since the establishment of the stock market with a total scale of more than VND94 trillion on 3 exchanges, bringing the holding ratio of foreign investors down to below 16%.
The net selling value of foreign investors on the Vietnamese stock market since the beginning of 2023 has been approximately 134 trillion VND, meaning about 5.2 billion USD of foreign capital has been withdrawn from the Vietnamese stock exchange.
Experts in the past have still expected the market to have consensus on the attractiveness of the Vietnamese stock market as well as the possibility of early promotion to emerging market - Emerging Market to help attract foreign capital flows. But the reality is the opposite. Vietnam is a market with strong net selling in the past 4/5 years with the largest selling rate in the region if calculated on the capitalization or total value held by foreign investors.
The group of analysts from SGI Capital has given analysis that Vietnam's market valuation is not more attractive than other markets, although most of them are classified as high-cycling risky groups such as banking, finance, and real estate. Therefore, it will be difficult to expect foreign capital to return to net buying in 2025 if the valuation is not cheap enough and the exchange rate risk still exists.
At the end of each monetary easing cycle, after cash flow and a large number of new investors have entered the market, good opportunities will become difficult to find and the attractiveness of the stock market will also decrease. The cash flow will then be shared with other investment channels such as real estate, gold, or digital assets...
In the context of unfavorable cash flow, in the general valuation not cheap, the price movement of each stock will depend largely on the internal strength of the enterprise and the financial capacity of shareholders. Differentiation can be very harsh in this year's weak cash flow environment," SGI Capital expressed its opinion.
In a newly updated report, SSI Securities Company believes that capital flows from Investment Funds into the Vietnamese market will still be affected by many mixed factors in 2025. Accordingly, capital flows will be limited by expectations of the Fed's slow rate cut speed and exchange rate pressure, unpredictable policies under the term of US President Donald Trump or potential economic recession, or the number of stocks in industry groups attracting cash flow such as technology is quite limited.
However, SSI also pointed out a bright spot from the fact that the ownership ratio of foreign investors according to the total market capitalization is currently only about 16%, the lowest level since 2015. This means that the "room" of foreign capital withdrawal has narrowed significantly, which could cause net selling pressure to gradually decrease in the future.
