Staff at FPT stock trading floor during their working hours (Photo: VNA) Vietnamese shares were mixed on September 15 while higher global oil prices helped boost local energy companies.
At the end of the trading session, the VN Index on the Hochiminh Stock Exchange rose 0.2 percent to close at 563.27 points. Meanwhile, the Hanoi Stock Exchange's HNX Index dropped 0.2 percent to finish at 76.64 points, extending the northern market's losses to a fourth day in a row.
Energy firms led gainers as a slight increase in West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude buoyed energy companies.
WTI crude on September 15 traded at 44.24 USD a barrel, an increase of 0.5 percent from 44 USD a barrel on the previous day.
Petrovietnam Gas Corp (GAS) was up 0.6 percent, Petrovietnam Drilling & Well Services (PVD) rose 0.3 percent, Petrovietnam Coating Co (PVB) gained 1.4 percent, and Drilling Mud Corp (PVC) increased by 3.1 percent.
A 6.7 percent increase in the Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BID) also helped lift the benchmark VN Index. BID is now the fourth largest company on the Vietnamese securities market with a capitalisation of 80 trillion VND (3.56 billion USD).
Foreign investors bought total 6.7 million BID shares, equal to 73.6 percent of total BID shares that were traded on the market, for total value of 190.6 billion VND (8.5 million USD) – nearly 10 percent of total trading value on both bourses.
BID also topped the market trading with 9.1 million shares being traded, followed by property developer FLC Group (FLC) with nearly 3.8 million shares.
However, BID was the only bank stock that made gains among nine banks on Vietnam's stock market.
Among these banks, Sacombank (STB) was down 3.7 percent, Vietcombank (VCB) fell 1.2 percent, and Military Bank (MBB) lost 3.2 percent.
"The financial sector will likely remain quiet as it has been for the past several days because the firms in this sector are waiting for this week's meeting of the US Federal Reserve to decide whether it will raise the interest rate", brokerage Saigon-Hanoi Securities reported.
Two local bourses traded more than 114 million shares with trading value of 1.95 trillion VND (86.7 million USD), an increase of 11.4 percent from September 14.-VNA
