It's a weekday morning, and a stuffy stock trading floor in Vietnam's largest city is a beehive of activity, filled with people who should be somewhere else.
Absentee office workers, students and housewives jostle for space with professional traders, shouting buy and sell orders with their eyes fixed on the red figures of the electronic board of the Saigon Securities brokerage.
Vietnam is in the grip of stock fever, and everyone is getting into it.
PHOTO: AP
An army of giddy investors, many of them blissfully unconcerned with the more technical points of equity trading, are driving a bull market that last year outperformed every other stock market in Asia.
"I don't know much about the companies," said 56-year-old housewife Nguyen Thi Huong, taking a punt in a securities company in Hanoi. "I make orders with the crowd. Sometimes I lose, sometimes I make money. It's a lot of fun."
Vietnam's main stock exchange, the HCMC Securities Trading Center, is only seven years old, but its growth has been stunning, from around 300 million dollars in early last year to a volume of US$16 billion now.
Last year the benchmark VN-Index rose nearly 145 percent, and so far this year it has gained more than 47 percent.
Seasoned market watchers and the IMF have warned the market is overheating, forming a dangerous speculative bubble.
Despite those concerns, the VN-Index bounced back from recent international jitters and a mid-week wobble to close last Friday at 1,109.76 points, up 4.15 percent for the day.
The stocks frenzy is driven by optimism about the "mini-China" economy which last year grew by 8.2 percent and is set to gain more steam as Vietnam's January entry into the WTO boosts exports and investment.
Vietnam's market has gained momentum since global financial institutions such as Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan joined the fray and after US President George W. Bush last November visited the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange.
As the communist government is plunging the country head-first into the free market era, state-owned enterprises are issuing stock to tap the country's large and idle savings pool for capital.
For ordinary Vietnamese -- known for their love of gambling on anything from football matches to buffalo races -- this has equated a gold rush, fuelled by tales of fabulous overnight riches.
"Now in Vietnam no business is more profitable than stock trading," said Tran Thanh, 45, who quit his job to become a market player and says he turned less than US$10,000 into over US$300,000 in two years.
Market mania may rein on the official trading floors, but for many investors the real action is online, a trend that has transformed coffee shops and tea houses into centers of market trade and gossip.
Many state companies have in recent years issued to their managers and staff unlisted shares which are now hotly traded in an unregulated market that dwarfs the official market.
About 700 companies are traded on this grey market compared to fewer than 200 on the official markets, said Le Nhi Nang, deputy director of the HCMC exchange.
But in the absence of reliable balance sheets or a strong financial press, many traders act on gut feelings and rumors picked up from co-workers, at weddings or on a plethora of Web sites and chatrooms.
"A vegetable seller might earn more money than an economics professor because her analysis is simple," said Thanh, himself a self-taught investor who has snubbed scores of new training courses on offer.
Andy An Ho, director of Prudential Investment here, says many of the new "momentum or speculative investors" will "most likely know little about the companies they invest in and will rely heavily on their friends, neighbors, insiders and brokers for recommendation."
Thanh says that he spends much of his time in a coffee shop with wireless Internet access to track real-time market news.
"Online forums are also very useful, but we have to be careful because most of the information on them is not real," he said.
Vietnam's regulators have been at pains to catch up with the stocks craze.
Hanoi has backed off plans to impose capital controls, which had caused jitters among foreign investors, but has ordered stricter oversight and imposed fines for spreading false information and insider trading.
Yet the grey market remains an unregulated world where knowing the right people with the right information is key to sorting out the winners from the losers.
"Having internal information is very important," confided a 29-year-old state employee who asked not to be named. "Several of my colleagues, especially bosses, have become very, very rich recently."
"Sometimes I have inside information, for example that a company is going to obtain a big contract with a foreign partner," he said. "I share that with one or two of my best friends so we can benefit together."
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