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Before you decide to invest in any field or market, the first thing to look at is the state that market is in right now.
Why does this matter? Simply because you will know where the market stands and how far it has developed, and from that you can judge whether entering it now is sensible, or what you would have to prepare in order to fit the stage the market has reached…
In this article we will look together at an overview of the Forex market in Vietnam, but first, make sure that you are someone who intends to invest in Forex, or at least has an interest in this market.
What is foreign exchange, and what is the Forex market?
This section is for anyone who has not yet read about the Forex market and the basics around it. If you have read about it before, you can skip this section and start straight away with the main content further down.
The Forex, or foreign exchange, market is a decentralized market where individuals and organizations all over the world buy, sell and exchange currencies over the internet.
In the past, the only parties trading foreign exchange were banks, investment funds and other financial institutions. With the development of technology, small individuals like us can now take part in this market as well, with nothing more than a phone or a computer with an internet connection and a starting capital of a few dollars.
To trade foreign exchange, an investor needs to open an account at a Forex broker, deposit money into that account and start trading. The assets you can trade in this market are currency pairs, gold, shares, indices, cryptocurrencies, commodities, energies… If you expect the price of an asset to rise, you place a Buy order; if you expect it to fall, you place a Sell order. The profit or the loss is worked out from the difference between the price when the order was placed and the price when it was closed.
Within the scope of this article we only summarize a few main points about Forex and about how trading in this market works. To read further, you can look at the following articles:
- What foreign exchange is, and common questions about the foreign exchange market.
- What Forex is: 101 basics you need to know about Forex trading.
An overview of the Forex market in Vietnam
To see the state of the Forex market in Vietnam today, we will go through a number of aspects that show how far this form of online investment has developed: whether foreign exchange business is lawful, how many brokers are present in Vietnam, how many traders in Vietnam are trading in this market, which assets are traded most commonly, and the IB networks and the Forex websites in Vietnam today.
Is foreign exchange business lawful in Vietnam?
Put another way: is investing in Forex in Vietnam lawful, and is an investor protected by Vietnamese law if a dispute arises with an intermediary or with a Forex broker?
This is probably the first question anyone wants cleared up before entering this market. Yet when you start looking into it you get a great many answers along the lines of Forex is not yet recognized by Vietnamese law, an investor should pick a broker licensed by a reputable regulator… and rarely a direct answer to whether trading Forex in Vietnam is lawful or not.
Our answer is this. As for Forex brokers based in Vietnam, every one of them runs without a license, against the law. As for an individual investor, trading Forex through a broker abroad is not among the cases of buying and selling foreign currency that the law permits, so it carries the risk of being treated as a breach of the foreign exchange rules. What is certain is that an investor is not protected by law when a dispute with the broker arises.
So weigh carefully the reasons to “play Forex” against the risks you may run into, work out how much risk you can accept and how much of a gamble you are prepared to take, and then make a sound decision on whether to enter this market at all.
To understand better how this form of financial investment stands against the law, you can also read: Is Forex trading legal in Vietnam?
How many investors in Vietnam take part in the foreign exchange market
Although it is neither permitted nor protected by law, a great many investors in Vietnam have taken the gamble and entered this market, drawn by the returns they hope for.
Putting an exact figure on the total number of traders in Vietnam trading in this market is very hard, but we can point to a few data points that show a great many investors in Vietnam are trading Forex.
The forum traderviet.com, one of the large Forex communities in Vietnam, has tens of thousands of registered accounts. That figure does not say exactly how many people are trading, but it does show that a great many people have heard of Forex.
So, out of everyone trading Forex, how many have succeeded and how many have failed?
That is another question it is very hard to answer precisely, because there is no official count for Vietnam. In Europe, where brokers are required to publish the figure, most retail CFD trading accounts lose money, and there is no reason to think traders in Vietnam are much different.
The gap is that wide because most of the people who trade Forex treat it as nothing more than a bet on luck, with no preparation in trading knowledge or in international finance, so losing and failing follows naturally. The small remainder treat trading as a serious occupation, with a plan and tight risk management, but even for them the income is not as steady as a salaried job.
Even in that second group, being serious and persistent does not ensure you will make money; it only helps you avoid the most obvious failures.
How many Forex brokers are present in the Vietnamese market
Put another way, how many Forex brokers offer a service to traders in Vietnam.
There is no exact figure for how many Forex brokers are operating. Some older counts estimated more than a thousand brokers using the MT4 platform worldwide, and a great many of them take clients from Vietnam.
Only a portion of those hold a license from a strict regulator; the rest are registered only in places with loose oversight, or are not supervised by any authority at all.
With that many brokers around, traders in Vietnam have plenty of choice, but it is also harder to tell a trustworthy broker from a fraudulent one.
Before you pick a broker, read how to check a Forex broker before you open an account.
The products traders in Vietnam trade most commonly
There are many kinds of product you can trade in this market, not currencies alone. They include currency pairs (forex), metals, indices, shares, ETFs, bonds, cryptocurrencies, energies, agricultural commodities… (mostly as contracts for difference, CFDs), and each group in turn contains many different assets, quoted in many different currencies. Depending on the broker, the number of instruments available runs from a few dozen to a few thousand.
Of these, currency pairs and gold are the 2 main products, the ones most traders pay attention to and trade most. That is because these 2 kinds of asset are more familiar to most traders, and there is more market information about them than about the other groups.
The IB networks and the Forex knowledge websites
The IB networks
One of the things that has made Forex easy for investors to reach is that brokers push their marketing hard through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and through the IB – Introducing Broker network; IBs are the people who directly find clients and walk them into this market.
If you go on Facebook and type the word forex, you will see a great many results about Forex IBs, Forex fan pages and Forex groups. These IBs regularly share market information and the trading results of their own or of their clients in order to draw other people’s attention, while the fan pages run ads to find clients. Remember that an IB is paid commission on the trading volume of the client themselves, so it is in the IB’s interest that you trade a lot, whether you win or lose; screenshots of profits are also very easy to fake.
Some 5 years ago, Forex trading was not yet that widespread, and an investor who already knew about stocks would usually come to the Forex market earlier than everyone else. Today, if you have any interest in finance, in online investment channels or in ways of making money online, or even if you merely scroll Facebook diligently every day, sooner or later you will come across Forex.
Forex knowledge websites
One of the reasons most traders fail in the Forex market is precisely that they do not understand the market and have no trading knowledge and no knowledge of international finance. So to succeed in this market, the thing that matters above all is investing in knowledge.
Do not worry too much, though, about not knowing where to begin or where and how to find that knowledge. There are now hundreds of websites and blogs building content on Forex knowledge, on how to trade and on everything else connected with this market, both foreign sites and Vietnamese ones.
For every new piece of knowledge, every new concept or any question at all about Forex, you only have to search on Google and you will get a great deal of different information from different websites. What matters is that you learn to filter which information is right and which website is trustworthy and followed by many traders.
Does it make sense to enter the foreign exchange market now?
At the time this article was reviewed (September 2026) we had not seen any legal document allowing an individual to trade margined Forex through a broker abroad, and nobody can predict with certainty when that will change. Check the latest rules before you decide.
As things stand, the legal restrictions mean that entering the market now calls for a lot of daring on the investor’s part. On top of that, the foreign exchange market carries very large risks, and you should only trade Forex if you can accept them.
Once you have decided to accept the risk, when you enter matters less than how you prepare: knowledge, a trading plan and money management. The market does not promise a profit to anyone, so you should only start properly once that preparation is in place.
If you are not ready, you should try a Demo account first. If you are ready, start with only a small amount of capital to limit the risk. Trade in larger size only once you have built up enough experience.
We hope that after this article you understand the state of the Forex market in Vietnam today more clearly, and can answer for yourself the questions “should I play Forex?”, “is now a reasonable time to join?” or “what do I need to prepare to enter this market?”.
