The Effect of Recent Financial Crisis over Global Portfolio Diversification Opportunities – Empirical Evidence A Comparative Multivariate GARCH-DCC, MODWT and Wavelet Correlation Analysis

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the possible portfolio diversification opportunities between Asian Islamic Market and other regions‟ Islamic Markets; namely USA, Europe and BRIC. This study makes the initial attempt to fill in the gaps of previous studies by focusing on the proxies of global Islamic markets - based on the 6 years‟ daily data, from 04/2008 to 03/2014 - to identify the correlations among those selected markets by employing the recent econometric methodologies such as MGARCH-DCC, MODWT and the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT). By utilizing the MGARCH-DCC, this paper tries to identify the strength of the correlation among the markets. On the other hand, to see the time-varying nature of these mentioned correlations, we utilized CWT. For robustness, we have applied MODWT methodology as well. The findings tend to indicate that the Asian investors have a better portfolio diversification opportunities with the US markets followed by the European markets. BRIC markets do not offer any portfolio diversification benefits, which may be explained partly by the fact that the Asian markets cover partially the same countries of BRIC markets, namely India and China. Considering the time horizon dimension, the results narrow down the portfolio diversification opportunities only to the short-term investment horizons. The very short-run investors (up to 8 days only) can benefit through portfolio diversification, especially in the USA and European markets. The above-mentioned results have policy implications for the Asian Islamic investors (e.g. Portfolio Management, Strategic Investment Management).