This paper investigates the co-movement of nine Islamic Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) returns using wavelet coherence methods. The results tend to indicate consistent comovement between most of the ETF returns especially in the long run. The study also uncovers evidence of wide variation of co-movement across the time-scales during the global financial crisis and the Euro debt crisis. Strong co-movement can be observed during the global financial crisis, both for the medium term investors and long term investors. The paper also studies the relationship between different ETF returns using wavelet multi-resolution analysis. The cross-correlation analysis also shows certain significant and positive correlations between the ETF returns, especially during the period of global financial crisis. The findings from these two recent dynamic time-scale decomposition methodologies have important policy implications for risk management and investors' investment policy.
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IntroductionExchange Traded Funds (ETF) emanated from the innovation in the capital market.ETFs are tradable securities which derive their value from a pre-defined basket of securities which are constituents of an index. These types of ETFs derive their value (and volatility) from market movements of the underlying stocks, which comprise the portfolio, and these funds are similar to index funds managed by institutional portfolio managers.Index-linked products, such as ETFs, have been increasingly successful because they provide investors with benefits of diversification through one investment product There are several advantages of using ETF data in the study. First, these securities are liquid and give investors instant exposure to the underlying index. It is not necessary to buy a "basket" of securities to mimic the index, and ETFs are not subject to the nonsynchronous trading problems associated with stock index price data. The ETFs under study here are not vulnerable to potential biases since they are traded securities, not indices that are calculated from underlying individual stock price data (Krause & Tse (2013)).The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, we review the literature 2 See Abdou Diaw et al (2010), which give a good analysis on the performance of Islamic ETF in Malaysia by looking at the performance of MyETF-DJIM Malaysia Titan 25 (MyETF).3 on ETF performance and the wavelet applications. In Section 3, we provide a brief introduction on the ETF considered and their unique aspect. The wavelet technique is