Conventional and Islamic Indices: A Comparison on Performance

Islamic finance has become an important component of the international financial system. Although the very recent experience of Islamic finance was 40 years ago it is growing by 30% since 2000. Despite the growing interest in Islamic finance and Islamic capital markets, there are a few empirical studies that examine the performance of Islamic equity investing in the literature. As can be seen from the literature, the relations between Islamic and conventional indices vary according to the period and country of study. In some studies, it is suggested that Islamic indices have lower risk and volatility, but also lower return than the conventional indices in the periods of decline. In other studies, exact opposite results were obtained. However, when an overall assessment is made, it is widely regarded that Islamic indices are more stable under bear market conditions and more suitable for portfolio diversification. The purpose of this study is to compare the return performances of Islamic and conventional indices. The paper studies the impact of Sharia s creening on the performance of an index. The paper aims to answer the following question: Do Islamic indexes achieve lower returnlevelswhencomparedt otheir counterparts?Accordingtothefindings of this study and in accordance with most of the literature, there is no significant difference between the returns of Islamic and conventional indices. Also when the mean returns are compared between Islamic indices and their counterparts, it’s been observed that all of the Islamic indices show higher performance than their counterparts.