On the headline number, September was a heavy month for foreign selling: VND 4,848.5 billion in net sales on HoSE. Break it down by ticker, though, and the picture narrows sharply. Nearly 99% of that value sits in just three stocks: VHM, VIC and VPB. Everything else on the exchange, added together, roughly nets out to zero.
That matters for how the number should be read. A large net-selling figure is usually taken as foreign capital leaving the market as a whole. September's data says the pressure fell mainly on holders of three large caps rather than spreading evenly.
The scale: almost triple August
According to Báo Đầu tư Chứng khoán (ĐTCK), foreign investors were net sellers of 202.6 million shares worth VND 4,848.5 billion on HoSE alone in September. That is up 45.8% by volume and 192.6% by value from August.ĐTCK Working backwards from that increase, August's net selling on HoSE comes to only about VND 1,660 billion (Investify's calculation).
Across all three exchanges, net selling totalled VND 4,673.7 billion, which is less than the HoSE figure on its own.ĐTCK The difference implies foreign investors were actually net buyers of about VND 175 billion on HNX and UPCoM combined. All of the selling pressure, in other words, was on the main board.
Nor was September a one-way month. Foreigners were net buyers of more than VND 1,000 billion on September 18, and of roughly VND 700–800 billion in each of the September 14 and 15 sessions.ĐTCK The selling clustered at the end of the month, and September 30 marked a sixth straight session of net foreign selling.Vietstock Over the month, the VN-Index fell 63.5 points, or 3.47%, closing at 1,768.62.ĐTCK
Three stocks carry almost the entire total
The ticker-by-ticker ranking is where it gets interesting. VHM saw net foreign selling of VND 2,408.5 billion, VIC nearly VND 1,247 billion, and VPB VND 1,132.8 billion, or 45.8 million shares.ĐTCK VPB was also the most heavily net-sold stock by volume.
Together, the three account for about VND 4,788 billion, close to 99% of net selling on HoSE. VHM alone makes up roughly half. An investor looking only at the headline could easily conclude the whole exchange was being sold, when in practice the selling was concentrated in a very narrow corner.
The pressure on VHM ran right up to the last session of the month. On September 30, VHM was again the most net-sold stock at about VND 329 billion, followed by TCB at about VND 156 billion and VIC at about VND 82 billion.ĐTCK The selling in VHM showed no sign of stopping as the month closed.
Strip out the three, and the rest is close to flat
Excluding VHM, VIC and VPB, every other stock on HoSE combined saw net foreign selling of only about VND 60 billion. That small figure does not mean foreigners sat still elsewhere. It is the result of buying and selling that largely cancelled each other out.
On the sell side, the big banks TCB, CTG and VCB were each net sold by roughly VND 400–450 billion. On the buy side, FPT attracted net foreign buying of more than VND 865 billion, or 11.5 million shares, topping the net-buy list again as it did in August, when it drew more than VND 879 billion.ĐTCK Buying in FPT and a handful of other names offset almost all of the selling in the banks.
For anyone holding stocks outside those three names, the VND 4,800-billion-plus headline is easy to misread. Foreign capital did not pull out evenly across the board in September. It exited heavily from three large caps, sold moderately in a few big banks, and kept buying FPT.
Versus August: the increase came from the two Vingroup names
To compare direction between the two months, Investify's own ticker-level trading database is useful. It produces lower figures than ĐTCK for VIC and VPB because of differences in aggregation, so it is suited to comparing the direction of change, not to replacing the absolute numbers.
On that dataset, VHM saw net foreign selling of about VND 2,366 billion in September, against about VND 998 billion in August. VIC rose from about VND 176 billion to about VND 909 billion. VPB was virtually unchanged at around VND 820 billion a month.
Read this way, September's jump came mostly from VHM and VIC. The selling in VPB is not new; it was running at a similar pace in August.
Why they sold: no official explanation yet
News reports and brokerage notes in the last days of September mostly logged net selling by ticker without giving a specific reason for the heavy foreign selling in VHM and VPB. Thời báo Tài chính Việt Nam described the selling in VHM as "profit-taking".TBTCVN That is the paper's reading of trading sentiment, however, not a confirmation from the foreign investors themselves.
For VPB, CafeF reported net foreign selling of about VND 249 billion on September 29, again with no reason given.CafeF This piece therefore does not assign a motive to the selling. What can be said with more confidence is who stood on the other side of the trade.
Who absorbed the shares foreigners sold
When foreigners are net sellers, someone has to be buying. In VPB, the big buyer is visible. Over 15 sessions from September 8 to 28, securities firms' proprietary trading desks were net buyers of more than VND 1,925 billion of VPB shares.CafeF The report linked that buying to expectations for third-quarter earnings and to reports that a foreign shareholder is negotiating to raise its stake in VPBank. On September 30, proprietary desks were still buying VPB heavily while foreigners kept selling.Vietstock
The two flows run in opposite directions, but they should not be read as proprietary desks buying exactly what foreigners sold. The figures also cover different windows: one is the whole of September, the other September 8 to 28. What they show is that in VPB, foreign supply is meeting domestic demand of comparable size.
For VHM and VIC, no data yet identifies a counterparty buyer this clearly. It is fair to say the shares were absorbed by domestic investors, but that is an inference from market structure, not something measured directly.
Signals to watch
September's data points to a clear conclusion: foreign selling on HoSE was a story about three stocks, not the whole exchange. One month is not enough to call a trend, and the six-session selling streak at month-end shows the pressure on VHM, VIC and VPB had not eased when the month closed. The concentration thesis only breaks if the selling spreads to other names.
The answer will come from ticker-level foreign trading data in the first weeks of October. Signals worth watching:
- Whether VHM, VIC and VPB stay at the top of the net-sell list while the rest of the market stays close to flat.
- Whether big banks such as TCB, CTG and VCB climb to become the largest net-sold names in place of those three.
- Whether FPT holds on to net buying or flips to net selling.
If the last two signals appear, the selling has broadened, and only then would the headline number accurately reflect foreign sentiment toward the market as a whole.