HÀ NỘI — Vietnamese shares slumped again Monday as investors struck the market with strong selling, concerned over the US-China trade conflict.

The benchmark VN Index on the HCM Stock Exchange plunged 1.90 per cent to close at 951.64 points.

The southern market index lost total 3.8 per cent last week.

This was the second hit for the stock market since last Thursday, when the VN Index lost nearly 5 per cent due to global sell-off.

The HNX Index on the Hà Nội Stock Exchange lost the same 1.90 per cent to end at 107.67 points.

The northern market index dropped a total 4.28 per cent in the previous week.

More than 181 million shares were traded on the two local exchanges, worth VNĐ3.95 trillion (US$175.4 million).

The disappointing performance of the stock market was mostly attributed to poor investor confidence, which pushed stocks across Asia down to the negative territory, according to Bảo Việt Securities JSC (BVSC).

Investors were worried about the world’s economic growth after the US threatened to escalate its trade tension with China, along with fears over China’s economic slowdown and the coming US rate increases, BVSC said in its daily report.

The decline was recorded from the start of the day and increased towards to the last minutes, BVSC said, adding that was “partly attributed to investors’ concerns about selling pressure at low price ranges in the next session.”

With liquidity falling to 181 million shares on both local exchanges and negative market breadth, it was clearly that “investors were cautious about the market’s strong and unpredictable volatility at present,” the brokerage company added.

Large-cap stocks underperformed to pull the blue chip VN30 Index down 1.58 per cent to 928.55 points at the end of the day.

In the VN30 basket, 26 of the 30 largest stocks by market capitalisation declined while only four increased.

Among declining large-cap stocks were steel producer Hoa Sen (HSG), PetroVietnam Gas (GAS), food and beverage firm Masan (MSN), Vincom Retail (VRE) and logistics company Gemadept (GMD).

Vietcombank (VCB) and MBBank (MBB) lost 1.3 per cent and 2.3 per cent, respectively.

Vietcombank on Monday offered to sell 53.4 million MBBank shares it owned, but successfully offloaded only 5.9 million shares to 10 investors.

Those companies also dragged 17 of the 20 sectors down in value, data on vietstock.vn showed.

The worst-performing sectors included financial-banking, petroleum, food and beverage, and retail.

Foreign investors remained as net buyers on Monday but their net purchase value fell 75.8 per cent to VNĐ73.7 billion from Friday’s figure. — VNS