Herding Behavior: Do Domestic Investors Herd Toward Foreign Investors in Vietnam Stock Market?

With a view to attracting foreign investment and growing the economy, the Vietnamese government has hastened financial reforms, including the lifting of limitations on foreign investment, which has resulted in rapidly rising foreign ownership in recent years. To study the relationship between transactions of foreign investors and transactions of domestic investors on two stock exchanges in Vietnam Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HSX) and Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX). This study applies a secondary dataset comprising daily market trading information of 912 stocks from 18 industries listed on 2 Vietnam stock exchanges, including HSX and HNX, which includes executed price, executed volume, daily Buy Orders, and Sell Orders categorized into domestic investors' orders and foreign investors orders from 01.04.2010 to 10.04.2018. The regression results show a significantly positive relationship between foreign investors' trading and domestic investors' transaction in all trading activities in both up and down markets. Therefore, these results indicate that domestic investors in Vietnam are concerned with foreign investors' trading as an important sign, and domestic investors tend to follow their counterparties without appropriate fundamental information. From there, there are signs of herding behavior of domestic investors following foreign investors in transactions on the stock market in Vietnam.