The Creation of an Islamic Index on the Paris Stock Market: Methodology and Performance

Taking into account the huge potential and the increasing role played by the Islamic finance, this paper analyses the methodological process linked to the introduction of a shariah compliant index on the Paris Stock market along with a study of its short and long term performance. A screening process is applied to different stocks composing the SBF 250 index in order to make it shariah compliant. This process leads to the exclusion of almost 90% of the stocks, thus the final Islamic index is composed by 25 companies. The weighting procedure is based on the free float of each stock composing the index with a capping factor of 15%. From August 31, 2007 to August 31, 2010 the Sharpe Ratio, the Jensen’s alpha and the «  Buy and Hold  » returns lead to the same conclusion : the French 25 shariah outperforms both its conventional and shariah compliant counterparts, on the short run and on the long run. Over the same period, the low average beta of the French 25 shariah index (0.30) can be explained by the dominance of stocks belonging to the health industry (40%).