Despite its young age, the Vietnamese stock market has made great contributions to economic development in the last 20 years.

Chair of the State Securities Commission (SSC) Tran Van Dung commented that the investors have ‘overreacted’ to the nCoV outbreak, believing that the market will recover when the epidemic peaks, as it happened with SARS and H5N1.

The ‘January effect’ hypothesis proved to be true when the Vietnamese stock market saw stock prices increasing in the last 12 out of 19 years in the month of January.

Following a volatile 2018 which witnessed the US-China trade war, the stock market in 2019 was gloomy with the VN Index hovering around 900-1,000 points.

The newly set indexes, plus the possibility of the market upgrading, have led observers to believe that ETF will attract foreign capital.

The experts attending the Vietnam Investment Professionals Forum (VIPF) all predicted that the picture of the Vietnamese stock market would be bright in 2020 with the VN Index likely to exceed 1,200 points.

While foreign investors continue selling in the share market, they have been buying more than selling in the bond market since early 2019.

Vietnam will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the stock market establishment in 2020.

The VN Index may bounce back and reach the 1,000 point threshold again in 2020, or it may come closer to its peak in 2018 thanks to good macroeconomic conditions, foreign capital flow and reasonable valuations.

Vietnam was still attractive to investors in 2019 despite global caution about US President Donald Trump’s policies.

The Vietnamese stock market has been growing rapidly with market capitalization value exceeding 100 percent of GDP.

Some active funds are pouring money into the Vietnam’s stock market in anticipation of the market upgrading and are planning to withdraw the money to make a profit when the upgrading is announced.

The Vietnamese stock market is very promising in the eyes of foreign investors. However, the barriers in liquidity and transaction fees have discouraged them.

The stock market these days is beset with anxiety and cautiousness. Investors cannot predict how the stock prices while foreign investors sell more than buy.

The business results of listed companies in the first nine months of the year were fairly positive. But the unpredictability of the negotiations related to the US-China trade still exists.

Though the index has increased slightly, the stock market remains inactive as a lot of individual investors have incurred losses and many brokers have given up their jobs.

The number of companies which listed shares or are planning to list shares in 2019 remains very modest.

Foreign investors have made a net purchase of VND15.2 trillion worth of government bonds so far this year, according to SSI Retail Research.

South Korean invested securities companies are putting pressure on Vietnamese companies, competing in terms of service quality, number of branches and the possibility of providing loans for margin trading.

Vietnam’s benchmark VN-Index could breach the 1,000 point mark in the last quarter of the year after the Q3 corporate earnings season and with investors shifting attention towards firms with hopes for full-year earnings growth.