Strategies, paradigms and systems for Shariah-compliant portfolio management

The increasing worldwide demand of the Muslim population to invest their capital in financial products that do not conflict with the Shariah as well as the attractive capital value of these investors triggered the development of Shariah-compliant investment products such as Islamic equity funds. Since the area of Islamic finance is relatively new and investment trusts wanted to respond to the rising demand as quickly as possible, Shariah-compliant equity products found their way into practice without being researched in depth (the number of published papers or books analyzing current Shariah-compliance practices used in Islamic asset management is very limited). The main reason for this may be attributable to the fact that the development of such issues was driven by the industry which wanted to gain from the capital value of Islamic investors and therefore was not deeply analyzed and researched by both financial and Islamic researchers. The drawback of the industry-driven definition of Shariah-compliance procedures resulted in the development of different and non-standardized methodologies used across the Islamic equity management industry. Therefore this work focuses on the: - Analysis of current industry-driven Shariah procedures - Development of research-driven Shariah procedures - Extension of practical portfolio models by Shariah requirements - Development of a DSS prototype for dynamic and customized Portfolio Management - Empirical Analysis of Developed Concepts