This paper provides the practical application of a linear shrinkage framework on Vietnam stock market. The cumulative data points observed in this analysis are 468 weeks from January 2011 to December 2019. All the companies listed on Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE), except the companies under two years period from Initial Public Offering (IPO), are considered. The cumulative number of stocks picked is therefore 350 companies. The VNINDEX, which is the Vietnam Stock Index, is used as a reference index for shrinking to a single-index model. The empirical results show that the shrinkage of covariance matrix for portfolio optimization gives the promising results for the investors on Vietnam stock market. The shrinkage method helps the investors to produce the optimal portfolio in the sense of having higher profit with lower levels of risk compared to the portfolio of the traditional SCM method. Moreover, the portfolio turnover of shrinkage method is always kept at low magnitudes, and this makes the shrinkage portfolios save much transaction costs and reduce the liquidity risks in the trading process. In addition, the ability of shrinkage method in making profit is once again confirmed by the Alpha coefficient that achieves a high positive value.

Multi-criteria stock selection is a critical issue for effective investment since the improper stock investment might cause many problems affecting investors negatively. Investors need a range of financial indicators while they are choosing the optimal set of stocks to invest. This study aims to rank the stock of agriculture companies indexed on the Vietnam Stock Exchange Market. The data of 13 agriculture companies during the 2016-2019 periods was analyzed by analytical hierarchy process (AHP) integrated with grey relational analysis (GRA), multiobjective optimization ratio analysis (MOORA), and technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The AHP method is employed to determine the weights of the proposed financial ratios, and GRA, TOPSIS, and MOORA approaches are used to obtain final ranking. The results indicated that HSL is the top stock with the highest rank and GRA, MOORA, and TOPSIS rankings have strong correlation values between 0.78-1. The findings suggest that the integrated model could be implemented effectively to specific analysis of industries such as oil and gas, textiles, food, and electronics in future research. Further, other techniques like COPRAS, KEMIRA, and EDAS could be employed to evaluate the financial performance of other companies to solve investment problems.

The paper investigates the effect of the factors on the disclosure of sustainable development information of enterprises. The research sample includes 120 manufacturing companies listed on Vietnam stock market in 2019. This research uses ordinary least squares (OLS) to address econometric issues and to improve the accuracy of the regression coefficients. The empirical results show that five variables have a statistically significant positive effect on disclosure of sustainable development information of manufacturing companies, including firm size (SIZE), independence of board of directors (BOD), foreign ownership (FRO), return on equity (ROE), and financial leverage (LEV). The results indicate that state ownership (STO) has a statistically significant negative effect on disclosure of sustainable development information of manufacturing companies listed on Vietnam stock market. Besides, the research results also show there is a large difference in the disclosure of sustainable development information between listed companies in Vietnam, those of other emerging economies in the region, and the companies in developed markets. Therefore, this paper provides a new insight to managers and related parties on how to improve the firm’s sustainability disclosure to bring benefit for the firm itself and the stakeholders by reasonable decisions about the factors that affect disclosure of sustainable development information.

The paper examines the impact of information about cash flow from operating activities of firms listed on Vietnam’s stock market to the decision making of individual investors. Data were collected from interviews with 160 individual investors about their investment decisions based on information on profit growth and cash flow growth from operating activities. T-test was conducted to research on Vietnam’s stock market - a market considered as information that is not really public, transparent and ineffective. The research results show that: (1) investors do not care about cash flow from operating activities when making investment decisions if the company’s profits grow positively, (2) information about cash flow from operating activities only affects the decisions of individual investors once profit growth is negative, and (3) conflicting information between profit growth and cash flow growth from business activities significantly affects the confidence and comfort of investors in Vietnam’s stock market when they make investment decisions. Then, the study points out the mistake of investors when making investment decisions, and offers recommendations to investors when making investment decisions, not only concerned with profit growth, but also paying special attention to cash flow growth, especially cash flow from the company’s business operations.

Building a target capital structure is one of the most important decisions in corporate financial management. The purpose of this article is to identify the determinants of capital structure and adjustment mechanism toward the target leverage. The partial adjustment model was applied on a sample of 306 non-financial companies listed on Vietnam stock exchange market during the period of 2008-2017. By the fixed effect model estimation method, the research results have discovered the factors of growth opportunities, firm size, tangible fixed assets and firm’s unique characteristics have a positive effect on the target capital structure of enterprises. Besides, profitability and dividend payment have a negative effect on the target capital structure of enterprises. Accordingly, the research results show that the average adjustment speed toward target leverage of the firms is 90.03%. Research results also demonstrate firms have higher or lower debt ratio than the target debt ratio, capital surplus or capital deficit also have an impact on the adjustment rate toward the target capital structure. The research results are consistent with the Dynamic Trade-off Theory. From this result, this article has provided policy implications for non-financial companies listed on Vietnam’s stock market in building a reasonable target capital structure according to operating timeline to maximize enterprise value.

The paper aims to examine relationships between search-based sentiment and stock market reactions in Vietnam. This study constructs an internet search-based measure of sentiment and examines its relationship with Vietnamese stock market returns. The sentiment index is derived from Google Trends’ Search Volume Index of financial and economic terms that Vietnamese searched from January 2011 to June 2018. Consistent with prediction from sentiment theories, the study documents significant short-term reversals across three major stock indices. The difference from previous literature is that Vietnam stock market absorbs the contemporaneous decline slower while the subsequent rebound happens within a day. The results of the study suggest that the sentiment-induced effect is mainly driven by pessimism. On the other hand, optimistic investors seem to delay in taking their investment action until the market corrects. The study proposes a unified explanation for our findings based on the overreaction hypothesis of the bearish group and the strategic delay of the optimistic group. The findings of the study contribute to the behavioral finance strand that studies the role of sentiment in emerging financial markets, where noise traders and limits to arbitrage are more obvious. They also encourage the continuous application of search data to explore other investor behaviors in securities markets.