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The purpose of the study is to adopt Morlet’s wavelet method to examine the differences in the level of volatility (i.e. riskiness) between the conventional and Shari’ah indexes during the COVID-19 pandemic (February 4 to June 19, 2020) on selected Association of South East Asian Nation (ASEAN) and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. As a comparison, the equivalent time period of relative tranquillity is used; February 4 to June 19, 2019.

Morlet’s wavelet method is used in analyzing the volatility levels for both the conventional and Shari’ah indexes before and during the COVID-19 pandemic for the selected ASEAN and GCC countries.

This study has several findings; first, the markets in the ASEAN region appear to be more volatile during the pandemic than in the GCC region. Second, most of the Shari’ah indexes were more volatile during the COVID-19 pandemic than their conventional counterparts. Nevertheless, the GCC index pairs appear to show more similarities between both the Shari’ah and conventional index.

The findings from this study indicate that investors, government, regulators and all other stakeholders should stay vigilant during a pandemic or health threat period as it has become a pertinent source of volatility spillovers. As such, investors should devise optimal asset allocation strategies, portfolio diversification and portfolio rebalancing measures, taking into consideration not only financial adversity but also public health gravity as a potential source of turbulent markets.

This study uses the wavelet method to examine the volatility level of both the Shari’ah and conventional indexes during the COVID-19 pandemic and its equivalent time frame in 2019. It has further added to the Islamic literature by comparing the volatility between selected ASEAN and GCC countries. The wavelet method is most appropriate for short-duration studies as it captures both the time and frequency domains of the time-series behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to examine investor sentiment by measuring the impact of market sentiment shocks on the volatility of the Islamic stock index of five ASEAN countries, with noise traders as a proxy for market sentiment.

The GJR-GARCH model is used to capture the empirically observed fact that negative shocks in the past period have a stronger impact on variance than positive shocks in the present.

All five ASEAN Islamic stock indices show clustering volatility. However, only three countries, namely, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, demonstrate leverage effects. In addition, the effect of market sentiment on Islamic stock index returns is observed in the Indonesian and Malaysian markets, which are the two largest Islamic markets with a dominant Muslim population in the ASEAN. This finding implies that the trading behaviours of Muslim investors in the Shariah market are the same as their behaviours in the conventional market, that is, nonadherence to the Sunnah.

Whilst establishing investment strategies, creating portfolios and providing client-advisory services, investors and fund managers should factor in the presence of market sentiment and its impact on stock performance and volatility. In addition, a capital market system preventing rumour-based transactions is compelling.

In some markets, the Islamic financial products awareness should be increased through education to attract increased domestic investors with the potential to boost growth in the Islamic stock market.

Investigation market sentiment impacts on the Islamic stock index using noise traders as a proxy.