Trading exploded yesterday on both stock exchanges as investors responded positively to good news from a key State Securities Commission's meeting yesterday.

The commission announced that the Ministry of Finance would raise the margin (debt to equity) from the current 40-60 to 50-50 on February 1.
In an additional bid to boost liquidity on the market, the intra-day maximum fluctuation rate of a stock will increase from 5 per cent to 7 per cent on the HCM City Stock Exchange and from 7 per cent to 10 per cent on the Ha Noi exchange. The new regulation will take effect from January 15.

On the HCM City Stock Exchange, the benchmark VN-Index grew 0.36 per cent, closing 448.77 points by the end of yesterday's session after climbing to nearly 458 earlier in the morning.

The VN30 tracking the top 30 shares was up 1.17 per cent to 531.52 points.
Trading soared with almost 134.8 million shares, worth more than VND1.9 trillion (US$90.9 million), changing hands.

"Profit-taking shook the market and sank most stocks to the negative territory," analysts of FPT Securities Co wrote on the company's website yesterday.
Many investors were cautious with the uptrend after nine straight days of gains and started to lock in profits to offset losses incurred during the prolonged slump from May to November last year, they said.

A few blue chips retained big gains of nearly 5 per cent including food processor Masan Group (MSN), dairy giant Vinamilk (VNM) and Sacombank (ST) thanks to high demand. Many others started to decline.

By the end of the session, 68 shares were traded at the floor prices.
"However, the current rallying tendency is unlikely to end soon given strong cash inflows from the buy-side whenever the market shows signs of correction driven by profit selling," FPT Securities's analysts said.

Meanwhile, without the support of large caps, the HNX-Index on the Ha Noi bourse plummeted 0.57 per cent to end at 59.61 points due to heavy profit-taking selling pressure.

Most speculative stock lost ground, including Sai Gon-Ha Noi Bank (SHB), Sacomreal (SCR), Kim Long Securities (KLS), VNDirect Securities (VND) and PetroVietnam Construction (PVX), with losses from 2.7-6.6 per cent.

By the end of the session, over 138 million shares, worth more than VND1 billion ($47.8 million), changed hands, with SHB still being the most active code with a whopping 29 million shares traded.

Foreign investors continued to increase their investment in local stock. They picked up a combined net buy of VND238.4 billion ($11.4 million) worth of shares yesterday on both exchanges.