A Comparative Study Of Payoff In Current Conventional Futures Contracts And Proposed Shari'ah-compliant Futures Contracts

Futures contracts are one of the major financial derivatives instruments traded in the financial markets, providing important benefits especially in hedging, however, these contracts are forbidden in Shari’ah as they involve many legitimacy prohibitions such as riba, gharar, gambling and speculation. However, these contracts can be Shari’ah-compliant if they are free of those forbidden elements and consort with the Shari’ah requirement. As a result, there will be differences between current conventional futures contracts and purposed Shari’ah-compliant futures contracts particularly, with regard to the futures contractparties’ payoffs.The objective of this paper is to propose a model for implementation of future contract that is comply with Shari’ah requirement. This will become an alternative towards current conduct of future contract, as well as identify the differences between parties’ payoffs in current conventional futures contracts and the proposed Shari’ah-compliant futures contracts either if price fluctuations increased or decreased. The methodology of this paper is descriptive in nature by exploring the previous literature that discuss on the issue of future contract and its characteristics and the development of Shari’ah approved future contract based on the requirement of Islamic principles. As well as comparative analysis presents the differences between payoff in current futures and proposed Shari’ah-compliant futures. Based on the study, we can offer a Shari’ah approved futures contract by distinguishing the feature of the contracts where the conventional futures contracts are win-loss or loss-win contracts, while the Shari’ah-compliant futures contracts can be win-win, or win-loss, or loss-win or loss-loss contracts.