A derivatives market, which will start operations in August, is expected to draw more capital to the Vietnamese securities market for the rest of this year, experts told a seminar in HCM City last Saturday.

A derivative is a financial tool with a price and value that is dependent upon other another financial tool or underlying asset.

Derivatives can either be traded over-the-counter (OTC) or exchange-traded with four popular kinds of contracts: futures, options, swaps and forwards.

Nguyen Duy Linh, director of Saigon Securities Incorporation’s individual customers brokerage division, told a conference on derivatives and scenarios for the stock market in the later half said the first derivatives product to be traded in August would be the futures contract for the VN30 Index – a sub-index on the HCM Stock Exchange that captures the performance of the 30 largest companies by market capitalisation.

Using derivative products could help investors predict the future movement of securities and lock in profits expected from their invested assets, he said.

"In the derivatives market, people can make huge transactions with small amounts of money and therefore it provides the benefit of leverage," he said, adding that it is a great risk management tool and if applied judiciously, it can produce good results and benefit to investors.

"In addition, investors can buy and sell the same futures contracts in a day to get the benefit of liquidity or stop loss to avoid price fluctuations overnight. This advantage is also a popular investment strategy (intraday trading)," he said.

"The products offer opportunities but also risks as well," he said, adding that investors should understand their personality to choose a suitable trading strategy, as well as understand the products and follow trading discipline.

According to experts, although MSCI, a US investment research firm, declined to place Viet Nam on its watch list for emerging market status which would be up from Viet Nam’s current frontier market status, the market performed well in the first half of the year, with the VN-Index and HNX-Index both increasing strongly.

For example, VN-Index surged 16.8 per cent in the first half of the year, reaching 776.47 points, and the HXN-Index gained 23 per cent to 99.14 points. Trading liquidity also improved.

More noticeably, foreign investors’ trading also grew during this period. Last year, there was a very strong net withdrawal of up to VND6.76 trillion. But in the first six months of 2017, foreign investors poured into the Viet Nam’s stock market over VND9.04 trillion, said Nguyen Duc Hung Linh, director of SSI’s division of analysis and investment advisory for individual customers.

The Government’s economic initiatives to shore up investor confidence, such as increasing the foreign ownership limit in companies, equitisation of State firms and restructuring banks, would continue to push the stock markets up for the rest of this year, he said. — VNS