Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirement for the MSc in Finance FINANCE DISSERTATION ON FACTORS AFFECTING PERFORMANCE OF FOREIGN FUNDS ON VIETNAM STOCK MARKET HOANG HAI CUONG ID No: 19047270 Intake 3 Supervisor: Dr. Tran Thi Xuan Anh September 2020 17014126223531000000 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY With strong growth and development of the national economy over the las few years along with various contributive socioeconomic attributes, Vietnam has become an attractive place of investment for foreign investors. In recent years, the presence of investment funds in the financial market and financial system has been emerging. Assessing the performance of foreign investment funds in Vietnam stock market including both foreign-owned and foreign-invested funds, the paper consider several fund attributes like foreign ownership, years in operation and managerial characteristics with the board size along with other macroeconomic factors of economic growth, inflation, political stability and stock market expansion.
With respects to the limitation in the data published by investment funds in Vietnam, NAV annual growth rate was determined as the performance indicators used within this paper. The empirical evidences show that all fund-level attributes have insignificant relationship with its performance. The findings are somewhat inconsistent with previous studies on this topic, which was reasoned by the separation in terms of stock market characteristics between Vietnam and other markets assessed. In contrast, it was evident that macroeconomic characteristics would be better in explaining the performance of fund compared to fund-specific characteristics.
I ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This dissertation was conducted with the support of handful of people. This acknowledgement is to express my heartiest gratefulness to the people who had been supporting me in not only the completion of this dissertation but also my overall academic journey. I am undoubtedly indebted to my supervisor and my beloved teacher - Dr. Tran Thi Xuan Anh for her thorough support, meticulous guidance and incredibly knowledgeable advices throughout the conduct of this dissertation.
In addition, I would like to extend my appreciation to all the faculty’s and the University’s staff who has been assisting me in the acquirement of my degree. I also want to express my thankfulness to my classmates for giving valuable advices and insights as well as direct and indirect support along this journey. As a final remark, I would like to sincerest appreciativeness towards my family members, who has always been there for me, the good or the bad. I could not have done it without their support.
II Table of Contents EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. II LIST OF TABLES. i LIST OF FIGURES. ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.
Research Objectives and Research Scopes. Overview of investment funds within the financial system. Literature on fund performance indicator. Theoretical frameworks on factors affecting investment fund’s performance.
Variable Selection and Data Collection. Regression Model Formulation. Data Analysis Method. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION.
Current Investment Fund Landscape in Vietnam. Vietnam economic background. Investment funds in Vietnam. Summary of Findings.
Exploratory data analysis. OLS regression analysis. 59 LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Sample of investment funds.
Key regulation frameworks for investment funds in Vietnam (Nguyen et al. Summarize of OLS regression results. Summary of t-test of significance results. 52 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.
Financial intermediary within financial market (Source: Drake & Fabozzi). Common structure of mutual funds. Fund classification by financial instruments and risk level. VN-Index performance from 2010 to 2019 (FiinPro, 2020).
Foreign and local investors net buying/selling in 2019 (Source: FiinPro). Performance of major investment funds in Vietnam in 2019 (Source: FiinPro). Comparative performance between key investment funds and VN-Index (Source: CafeF). Fund Composition in the dataset.
Vietnam’s Annual GDP Growth Rate (Source: World Bank Data). Vietnam’s Stock Market Capitalization in billion USD (Source: Data World Bank). Vietnam’s Political Stability Index (Source: World Bank Data). 48 ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS - CAPM: Capital Asset Pricing Model - MPT: Modern Portfolio Theory - EMH: Efficient Market Theory - DEA: Data Envelopment Analysis - OLS: Ordinary Least Square - HOSE: Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange - HNX: Hanoi Stock Exchange - NAV: Net Asset Value - FP: Fund Performance - FR: Foreign Ownership - AGE: Years in operations of funds - BS: Board of Director Size - INF: Inflation rate - SMC: Stock market Capitalization iii I.
Research Rationale In recent decades, the presence of investment funds in the financial market and financial system has been emerging. Thanks to the fast-growing globalization within the financial market, the flow of capital from investment funds have been extended into a broader spectrum allowing investors to benefit from a wider range of selection for investment. Facing a broader range of investment opportunities, investors needs to be able to select the one that provide them with the highest returns at their specific level of risk acceptance. To this end, the ongoing discussion on how investors assess whether an investment fund is profitable or how to measure the return and performance of investment funds have gained giant attention in the recent years.
With the swift development and expansion of investment fund, the question of how to measure if the investment fund is performing well has urged the incorporation of number of studies with respects to this literature bodies. Tracing back to the history of this research problem, the pioneering scholars addressing this aspect can be referred to the early development of investment funds around the 1960s. Since then, there have been growing number of studies developed on this topic. While this topic has yet been settled with a universal solution, the ongoing discussion on the factors that might contribute to the performance of funds was raised in the middle of the confusion.
Utilizing different fund performance measurement from previous literatures, several scholars and studies have incorporated a wide range of analytical tactics to investigate on the determinants of high- performing investments. Once again, the problem has yet found an alignment among scholars. All of the above factors have become the motivation for the development of this paper. The study intends to fill the gap by assessing the drivers of foreign investment funds in Vietnam’s stock market.
Research Background With strong growth and development of the national economy over the las few years along with various contributive socioeconomic attributes, Vietnam has become an attractive place of investment for foreign investors. The investment flow into Vietnam might come in different forms from Foreign Direct Investment to investment in specific financial instruments, etc. Within the financial system of Vietnam, equity market is the most important market compared to other forms of market like bond market, derivative market, money market, etc. This fact in turn reflects the cruciality of the stock market in facilitating the financial capital from foreign investors into enterprises in Vietnam.
The growth of stock market in Vietnam has become a promising opportunity for investment funds in equity market to extend their investment horizon by including various Vietnam’s listed stocks in their portfolios. Furthermore, acknowledging the essentiality of foreign investment funds to not only the financial market but also the entire national economy, the government has been ongoingly developing the regulatory framework to ease the establishment and operation of investment fund in Vietnam, by which promotes the overall health of the financial market and enhance the flow of capital from foreigners into Vietnam. Similar like the current global overall trends, there have been limited regulations as well as literature on the measurement of performance for investment funds in Vietnam. At most, investors pouring money into investment funds in Vietnam relies heavily on the past performance and current portfolio of the funds to determine whether to make their investment or not.
Moreover, assessing the literature bodies with respects to this topic in Vietnam, this paper identified that there have been relatively limited number of studies exploring the factors contributing to performance of foreign investment funds in Vietnam. Research Objectives and Research Scopes 2 Based on the above research background and rationale, this study is developed as the research on the factors affecting the performance of foreign investment funds in Vietnam. By which, the scope of this paper is not limited of the form of funds, meaning that different forms of funds like mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, etc. can all be included.
On the other hand, under the scope of this paper, the sample would include not only foreign-owned funds but also include Vietnamese-owned funds with major investments from foreign partners to further enrich the dataset. Yet, a crucial point for this research scope is that the study focuses solely on equity funds meaning that funds investing in money market, bonds market, etc. would be excluded. With which, the research objectives were determined as follow: - To understand the current landscape of the stock market and foreign investment funds in Vietnam; - To assess how different fund-level factors affecting the performance of investment funds in Vietnam; To examine the macroeconomic factors’ impacts on the performance of investment funds in Vietnam.
Overview of investment funds within the financial system Within the financial system, the flow of funding is facilitated from those with surplus capital to those with the needs of capital either directly or indirectly. Capturing a broader picture, the financial system comprises of the financial markets and all of the financial institutions participating within such financial markets using a wide variety of financial instruments to serve their specific 3 needs and wants (Tagoe, 2016). The financial market offers three principal contribution to the economy, including price determination, liquidity and transaction cost reduction (Drake & Fabozzi, 2010). Within the financial market, the emerging role of financial intermediary has become increasingly essential for its fund facilitating functions.
Financial intermediary might perform its role through the creation of a more favorable transaction terms for investors and borrowers without direct interaction (Melicher & Norton, 2016). Financial intermediary within financial market (Source: Drake & Fabozzi). The process in which the financial intermediary facilitates the funding within the financial market transformed the less desirable financial instruments for the public into a more attractive financial instruments that might capture the needs and wants of investors (Drake & Fabozzi, 2010). Such processes can incorporate various asset transformation tactics targeting specific characteristics of the financial instruments (Shkarlet, Prokopenko & Dubyna, 2019).
These processes might include intermediating the maturity of the financial instrument, risk diversification or cost minimization (Drake & Fabozzi, 2010). Depending on the characteristics of the financial intermediaries, they can be categorized into different group like depository institutions and non-depository institutions with insurance firms, investment companies and investment banking. While depository institutions can be broadly referred as the banking system, non-depository institutions might include a broader range of activities as indicated above. 4 Of the financial intermediaries, investment companies have increasingly gained their popularity in the recent period with the growing interests of individuals in the financial markets.
Indeed, the financial market has long been considered as the playground for big players and investors with large amount of capital surplus; however, the presence of investment companies has altered such views majorly. To this end, the investment companies act as the intermediaries to pool the funds from large number of smaller investors to reduce non-systematic risks using diversification process and expertise of the managers (Melicher & Norton, 2016). Among investment companies, the presence of different forms of funds have become more emerging over the last few years. Through collective investment and capital from smaller investors, the funds pool the capital to make investment in different financial instruments varying from the specific fund’s purposes and investment strategy.
There are various forms of funds in the financial markets. At most, fund can be referred as mutual fund. Mutual funds are those open-ended funds that are usually managed with expertise from professional managers in pooling the capital and investment from smaller investors to purchase financial securities (Drake & Fabozzi, 2010).