Thursday, February 9, 2012

Today's Major Market Move: Vietnamese HNX Index Rises 6% In Thursday's Session

Even with the continued optimistic feelings about a successful outcome to the Greek debt negotiations, the best performing equity index in Thursday's session ended up being outside of Europe. Vietnam's HNX Index led all of the equity indexes that we track with a 6% gain, followed by a 5.3% rise in the Greek FTSE/ASE Midcap Index. Here's the top 10:

Click here to go to the live table.
The other main Vietnamese equity index, the Ho Chi Minh Stock Index (the HNX Index is based out of Hanoi), didn't follow suit and only rose .5%. In general the HNX Index tends to be the more volatile of the two. Here's a comparison of the two indexes alongside GDP growth (actuals and estimated) for the time period 2007 to 2015:
Click here to go to the live chart.

So even with today's 6% surge, the HNX Index still has a ways to go to get back to where it was at the start of 2007. Perhaps the fact that Bloomberg recently named Vietnam the #1 "Most Exciting Frontier Market" will help propel it, although "Exciting" is not synonymous for "We think it is going to go up". More from Bloomberg:
A stellar economic expansion rate puts Vietnam at the top of the list, but that's not the Southeast Asian country's only extreme — inflation is also sky-high, and its government debt load is among the biggest of the frontier markets analyzed. Meanwhile, Vietnamese currency volatility and stock prices are lower than those of many of its peers.

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