Malaysian evidence on the performance of Islamic mutual funds

Using robust performance models, this chapter evaluates the performance of Islamicmutual funds (IMFs) in Malaysia during the period February 1996 to December 2009.We respond to the following two questions. First, how does the performance of IMFscompare with conventional mutual funds (CMFs) in Malaysia? Second, do IMFs performbetter during bear markets? We find that IMFs generally outperform CMFs during thesample period. However, even though our results suggest that IMFs generally outperformCMFs during downward market trends, they do not appear to exhibit any significantinvestment hedging function during all crisis periods. � 2014 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.