Photo shows Vincom Centre Trần Duy Hưng in Hà Nội. The shopping mall operator Vincom Retail shares (HoSE: VRE) lost 1.3 per cent on Thursday. — Photo cafeland.vn

HÀ NỘI — Vietnamese shares fell for a third day as market sentiment remained negative under pressure of global stocks.

The benchmark VN-Index on the Hồ Chí Minh Stock Exchange (HoSE) dropped 0.60 per cent to end Thursday at 854.59 points.

The VN-Index has fallen total 1.91 per cent in the last three trading days.

The local market suffered the third declining day as overall sentiment remained poor on the increasing number of coronavirus infection cases in the US and the International Monetary Fund’s dim forecast of global economic growth, Sài Gòn-Hà Nội Securities (SHS) said in its daily report.

The large-cap and mid-cap trackers on HoSE declined while the small-cap tracker made modest gains.

The blue-chip index VN30 lost 0.64 per cent to 796.51 points while the VN30 futures was down three points to 781 points on Thursday.

The decline of the VN30 futures and the gap between the VN30-Index and its VN30 futures indicated that investors still felt negative about the market’s short-term development, SHS said.

In the VN30 basket, 23 of the 30 largest stocks by market capitalisation and trading liquidity declined while only four increased.

The large-cap decliners included construction firm Coteccons (CTD), HDBank (HDB), retailer Mobile World Investment (MWG), Techcombank (TCB), and property developers Vingroup (VIC) and Vincom Retail (VRE).

Coteccons was the worst-performer, tumbling 6.1 per cent on Thursday, while other large-caps dropped between 1.3 per cent and 2.1 per cent.

Those large-cap stocks also dragged the construction, banking, retail and real estate sector indices down between 0.7 per cent and 1.7 per cent, according to vietstock.vn.

The minor HNX-Index on the Hà Nội Stock Exchange struggled to gain 0.33 per cent to close Thursday at 114.07 points.

The northern market index had decreased by total 1.44 per cent in the previous three trading days.

More than 373 million shares were traded on the two exchanges, worth VNĐ5.1 trillion (US$219.8 million). Trading value was down a tenth from Wednesday’s figure.

Foreign investors net-sold total VNĐ66.3 billion worth of local shares while they net-bought nearly VNĐ53 billion worth of shares on Wednesday.

It is necessary to keep watching foreign trading in the coming days, SHS Said.

The VN-Index will keep swinging to consolidate in the 840-870 zone and purchases may rise after the benchmark beats 870 points with increased liquidity, the brokerage forecast. — VNS