Vietnamese shares pared early losses on Monday as oil and gas stocks moved higher to buoyed investor confidence from disappointing Q1 corporate earnings.

 

The benchmark VN-Index on the Hồ Chí Minh Stock Exchange inched down 0.04 per cent to close at 965.86 points.

 

The VN-Index was down as much as 0.71 per cent during the day. It fell total 1.69 per cent last week.

 

More than 216.3 million shares were traded on the southern bourse, worth VNĐ4 trillion (US$172.7 million).

 

The market was weighed down by financials, banks, food and beverage producers, tech firms and seafood processors.

 

The industry indices of those companies were down between 0.7 per cent and 2.4 per cent, data on vietstock.vn showed.

 

Securities sector index was the worst-performing, falling 2.4 per cent.

 

Among brokerage firms, HCM City Securities Corp (HCM) slumped 5.1 per cent after the company last weekend announced its Q1 post-tax profit dropped 75 per cent year on year to VNĐ82 billion.

 

SSI Securities Inc (SSI) and VNDirect Securities Corp (VND) also reported lower profits in the first quarter of the year. Their shares dropped 3.1 per cent and 2.8 per cent, respectively.

 

Securities firms had forecast their performances in the first three months of 2019 would be worse than a year ago as the market was short of supportive information and no large-cap State-owned enterprises sold shares in their IPOs.

 

The stock market was also weighed down by large-cap companies in the VN30-Index.

 

The blue-chip VN30-Index lost 0.26 per cent to end at 878.23 points with 16 of the 30 largest stocks by market capitalisation falling.

 

Oil and gas stocks advanced to offset a part of the market decline.

 

PetroVietnam Gas (GAS) was up 2.3 per cent, PetroVietnam Drilling and Well Services increased by 1.6 per cent, and PetroVietnam Power (POW) was up 1.1 per cent.

 

The growth of petroleum stocks was attributed to strong gains of oil prices. Brent crude advanced 2.3 per cent to trade at $73.60 a barrel on Monday.

 

According to MB Securities Corp (MBS), trading liquidity remained lower than the average level of the last 15 trading days and it indicated investors were still cautious and waiting for the signals of the market recovery.

 

Some leading sectors such as banking and consumer staple had broken their three and four-week bottoms. If those stocks continued running down, they would become heavy hitters for the market since those stocks were heavyweights for the VN-Index, MBS said.

 

On the Hà Nội Stock Exchange, the HNX-Index was down 0.23 per cent to end at 105.63 points.

 

The HNX-Index was down total 1.70 per cent last week.

 

More than 31.7 million shares were traded on the northern bourse, worth VNĐ372.5 billion. — VNS