How to open an individual stock trading account as a foreigner in Vietnam

In the past, the process was quite complicated with more than 3 steps involving police records and sworn affidavits of your identity. Luckily, these days with the downward infusion of foreign investment in the indexes, brokerages are trying harder and harder to get foreigners to participate as individual investors. Now is the best time to be an independent stock trader in the Vietnamese indexes.

According to the brokers at ACBS (a division of ACB) these are the current requirements to open an individual stock trading account for a foreigner.

Required documents:

• 2 copies of your passport notarized by the local party office in District 1 (HCMC)

• Passport with at least 6 months validity

• Vietnamese visa in current standing (no restrictions on the length of validity)

There are 3 main steps in order to open your trading account

1. Open your cash account with your broker

2. Sign a securities contract with your broker

3. Apply for a trading code from the Vietnamese Security Depository Center


The data required is quite straight forward for steps one and two and most brokers will allow you to apply for both the cash account and the brokerage contract at the same time. If they don't it would be better to look for a more customer friendly broker.

As it stands now, most brokers will require the following info at the time of depositing cash or securities.

- You full name as stated on your passport

- Date of birth, place of birth

- Passport number, date of issue, place of issue

- Valid Vietnamese visa

- Permanent address

- Contact address

- Telephone and email

Trading Code is similar to what other countries would call a brokerage account number. However in Vietnam, each foreigner is tracked closely to insure they are not committing fraud or money laundering in their trading activities. There are other reasons, but it is not the time to get into them now. Safe to say that most of the corrupt trading practices in Vietnamese stocks are not occurring at the retail investor level. A better way to understand it is that your trades will go through a clearing house tracked with your own individual code which can be analyzed by anyone who has the need to know what trades you have made. There are creative ways around this, but it cannot be under your own name.

It takes about 5 working days to receive your Trading Code and costs about 300,000 VND. Some brokers will charge more, others less, but it won't be much different.


If you have any questions about the process of opening an account or which brokers will suit your needs, you can always contact me in the comments below.

Some misconceptions about trading Vietnamese stocks

                                                                                     

There are few markets as compelling as the Vietnamese stock market.

With a surging middle class, highly literate, culturally open and entrepreneurial at heart, there is no market which captures my attention the way Vietnam does. Of all the emerging markets on the planet, I choose to stake my bullish bets on Vietnam for the foreseeable future.

There is, however, lots of misinformation about the Vietnamese stock market floating around. I want to clear up some of them here.  

Misconception #1

You have to have a background check to open a brokerage account.

While legally this is still on the books, the slowdown in brokerage business has placed the burden on the brokers rather than the client. If you want to trade the Vietnamese stock market, all you need now is equity to deposit into a brokerage account.

Misconception #2

There is a delay period for buying and selling stocks of 3 business days. This is partly true and partly false. Yes, you must wait 3 business days to exit a position you have already entered. But no, you do not have to wait 3 days to enter the stock as some other forums have stated.

There is talk of doing as much as possible to increase liquidity in the markets here but there is a general fear on the regulators side that it will turn the market into a vastly uncontrollable casino which they feel is generally harmful to long-term investors. While I do not share this sentiment, it is worth noting that the daily swings in the Vietnamese market are fairly orderly and this creates tremendous opportunity for those who are interested in swing trading the Vietnamese stock market.

Misconception #3

Stocks do not trade "real-time" as they do in other more mature markets.

Again, this used to be the case where there was a high middle and low point and a fixing price was determined at regular intervals throughout the trading session. Nowadays you can observe prices trading in real time from 9am (UTC +7) until 11:30 and then from 1pm until 2:45 pm Monday through Friday.

Considering these limited trade times, it is still ideal to trade based on Daily price charts. The speed at which the market trades is akin to Wall Street of the 1970s. This might seem a detriment to liquidity but safe to say anyone reading these pages is not trading in the millions of shares per transaction and thus it just makes trading decisions all the more low risk. The market maker system which Wall Street has now rejected is not a problem in Vietnam as a limit order is anonymous and FIFO is in play. In a culture of nepotism and corruption, the Vietnamese stock market is as egalitarian an opportunity as there ever has been. What a great time to be trading Vietnamese stocks.

Misconception #4

The market is a sham, prices are determined by large players who just give the impression of a fair market. While this is true in some smaller OTC stocks, there are foreign institutional buyers who are easily singled out--according to local mandates--and thus create opportunities for small investors to actually see in "real- time" what they are up to. This kind of transparency is advantageous to the little guy, it is nothing to fear.

While there are many real risks investing in Vietnam as a private investor, the allocation of a small portion of your long term capital should be heading towards Vietnam already.

                                                                          

Keeping an eye on the Vietnam ETF this year

While the bottom fell out earlier this month, large buyers have stepped in and we are challenging overhead resistance. With any good news we are poised to finish the year higher from here. Let's see how it goes...