International capital inflows contribute a critical part to macroeconomic stability and financial market growth for an emerging economy. As the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered unprecedented chaos in the financial markets recently, this study attempts to explore the current foreign investors’ behaviours and their impacts on the stock market performance in an emerging market. This study found long-term relationships between foreign investors’ trading behaviours and stock market returns. However, the COVID-19 pandemic is distinctive from previous financial crises regarding its impacts on foreign investors’ trading behaviours. Responding to shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign investors have changed their trading behaviours dramatically and somehow lost their role as a trend leader to domestic retail investors in the market.