Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The virtues of islamic investing

In what the new administration is calling “the worst economy since the great depression”, today’s whine-o-gram is touting the virtues of islamic market indexes. In an article published by the San Francisco Chronicle, it seems the Dow Jones islamic market indexes are outperforming the heathen market.

But all one has to do is google the funds and its clear the overall islamic indexes have been down for the last five years.

The two funds mentioned are the Amana Income and Growth funds and appear to be doing well according to the Amana website. However, the DJ islamic market has not been doing well, for the last 3 years if not since their inception.

I find this article to be misleading and for the SFC to pick only two funds from the tens of thousands of mutual funds and make an example of the elevated merit of sharia investing is dishonest.

2 comments:

Dinah Lord said...

So typical of the SF Chronicle's shoddy reportage, Twinny.

Sharia finance has not proven to be the big boon everyone said it would be. It has experienced a marked contraction right along with the world's other capital markets. Although I must add that I just read somewhere that London is now the largest center of Sharia Finance in the world.

How sick is that?

(Nice fisking job on the SF Chron. Bravo)

janice said...

The islamic index has under-performed the market for the last 3 years according to how I read the DJ prospectus'. Nothing like pure dhimmitude, lock-step SF reporting.

I read the same thing, I think in the Guardian.