The southern stock exchange experienced a technical crash at 2.31pm on Monday afternoon, bringing to a halt all trading activities.

In a statement released at 2am on Tuesday, HOSE said it would “shut down all trading activities on Tuesday” so that the southern bourse could go through technical examination.

“We are doing our best to fix the error so that the trading bourse can return to normal operations as soon as possible. We are sorry for this accident and expect corresponding cooperation from market members and investors,” HOSE said.

It has not promised a specific date on which all trading activities could resume.

In the letters sent to investors on the latest incident through brokerage firms, HOSE said all trading orders in the system became invalid at 8pm on Monday, and the transactions would be cancelled.

“I expect HOSE to return to normal operations on Wednesday,” said Trần Văn Dũng, Chairman of the State Securities Commission (SSC).

“It was an unexpected system failure, but investors should be aware that such an incident can happen to any market in the world,” Dũng said.

In the eventuality of any such incident in the market, investor confidence and market sentiment will be the first ones to suffer, he said.

“The most important thing to do right now is that stock exchanges and market regulators need to deliver instant messages to market members and investors so that they can make the right decisions,” Dũng said.

He expected investors to remain calm and asked them to make careful assessment of the current situation so that the crash would not affect their investment decisions in future.

The SSC chairman noted three issues that investors should think of at the moment. First, they must think carefully about the movement of the VN30 future contracts on the Hà Nội Stock Exchange’s derivatives market when the VN30 Index and the southern exchange remain shut down.

Second, investors should note that the last matching-order prices on Monday will be the reference prices for the southern market when it resumes operations.

Third, investors should not worry about the latest crash as the Vietnamese market is on its development stage, supported by good macro-economic conditions and a stable and strong foreign capital inflow.

This is the second system crash at HOSE since its first one in May 2008. Back then, investors were suddenly unable to enter their trading orders into the system after the market had opened for one hour.

The southern bourse had to close the trading day sooner than expected and had to abort all trading orders that had been imported into the system during the At-the-Opening (ATO) period. The southern market had remained closed for three days. — VNS