Mock securities exchange in Vietnam tests stock savvy of 2,500

HANOI, Vietnam -- Just like on Wall Street, share prices rose and tumbled with abandon throughout the day.

Modeled after the New York Stock Exchange, a mock securities market organized by a college professor drew about 2,500 Vietnamese eager to soak up lessons about capitalism in one of the world's last bastions of communism.

Most of the participants Sunday were college students, but a few were real investors from the city's 2-year-old securities exchange, organizer Dao Trung Kien said Monday.

"This is a good occasion for the students to practice their stock trading skills, while it's also a good opportunity for real investors to get used to the New York stock exchange model that Vietnam could apply in the future," he said.

The country set up its first postwar stock market two years ago in Ho Chi Minh City, its southern commercial hub. That exchange now lists 19 companies but limits investors to one trade a day.

Kien, a professor of corporate finance at the Ho Chi Minh Economic University, has been organizing simulations for the past four years to teach his students about the fundamentals of a stock exchange.

This time they were allowed to try their hand at a technique that burned many Americans during the dot-com bubble: day trading.

$100,000 to invest

Participants were given $100,000 in fake money to invest in the mock stocks of five companies on the exchange. Companies were modeled after American corporate giants including Microsoft and McDonald's.

Computers running software programmed by software engineering students displayed the fluctuations of the imaginary share prices on two giant TV screens, and five simulated brokerages handled the orders of the would-be investors.

The orders were more frantic than in years past because organizers lifted a limit on buying and selling in a single session to better simulate the fast pace of trading on Wall Street, Kien said.

"The securities market is now part of our economy, so Vietnamese people are trying to learn about it and trying to invest in it," he said.

Communist Vietnam started economic reforms more than a decade ago and is moving slowly toward a market economy.

Training students now guarantees there will be future investors for Vietnam, said Lynh Pham, a stockbroker with ACB Securities in Ho Chi Minh City who gave technical advice on setting up the practice exchange.

"In my time, I could not learn anything about the market, but these young people will play a major part in developing the future of Vietnam's securities market so they need to know about it now," he said.

The king of the mock market was a third-year economics student who made $995,130 from his initial investment. Pham Duc Duy's capitalist savvy earned him the top prize -- in real money -- of about $120.