Staying Invested through Market Volatility
Amina and Yusuf
What four market crises reveal about the same fear
If you've checked your portfolio more often than usual these past few weeks, you're not alone, and you're not being irrational. Markets have been unsettled by geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and their impact on energy prices, adding uncertainty around inflation and interest rates. The headlines are loud. The urge to do something is one of the most human responses there is.
So before anything else, one reassurance: moments like this are exactly what your portfolio was built for. Its diversification, its risk level and its long-term design all assume that periods like this will come. Nothing about recent weeks has changed that.
It's a feeling every investor in every generation has faced. So let us tell you about two of them.
Same crisis, same fear, two decisions
Go back to 2008. The global financial crisis hit markets around the world, and Shariah-compliant equities were not spared. From 2007 to 2009, the Dow Jones Islamic Market World Index, a broad measure of global Shariah-compliant stocks, fell 51.18% from peak to trough. A £100,000 investment at the top would have shrunk to roughly £48,820 at the bottom.
Imagine two investors holding that portfolio. Meet Amina and Yusuf.
Amina stayed invested. Not because she felt no fear. She read the same headlines, felt the same knot in her stomach, and checked her balance more often than she'd admit. But her goals, her time horizon and her circumstances hadn't changed. Only the headlines had. So she kept to the plan.
Yusuf sold at the very bottom, when the fear was at its peak. It felt like the responsible thing to do, protecting what was left. Six months later, once things felt calmer, he bought back in.
From that low, the index climbed 154.97% to reclaim its old peak. That sounds dramatic, but it's simply arithmetic: losing half your value requires a gain of more than 100% just to break even.
By the end of the recovery window, Amina was up 24.46%. Yusuf ended at −16.87%, a loss, despite the index fully recovering. Selling at the low locked in the loss, and sitting out the next six months meant missing part of the rebound that followed.
That's a gap of 41 percentage points between two people who lived through the same crash, held the same portfolio, and felt the same fear. The difference was never information, intelligence or luck. It was what each of them did with that fear.
Not a one-off
Here’s how the same two approaches played out across the major market shocks of the past 26 years, measured on the Dow Jones Islamic Market World Total Return Index:
In every completed episode, Amina came out ahead. Yusuf's losses weren't caused by the crises themselves. They were caused by being absent for the recoveries.
The index's own history shows why sitting out is so costly. Over the two decades to June 2026, the Dow Jones Islamic Market World Total Return Index delivered an annualised return of 10.05%. An investor who missed just the ten best days across those twenty years would have earned 6.59% a year instead, and missing the forty best days would have cut it to 1.15%. Those best days were nearly impossible to catch from the sidelines: seven of the ten occurred within 15 calendar days of the ten worst.
What your portfolio is already doing
Behind the scenes, the plan is doing its work.
Rebalancing. When market moves push your mix of assets away from its target, we rebalance back towards your strategic asset allocation, which systematically trims what has risen and adds to what has fallen.
Diversification. Your equity exposure is spread across global markets through index-based strategies, so it never depends on any single company, sector or region, or on anyone correctly predicting winners and losers. And depending on your risk level, your portfolio also diversifies across asset classes, holding sukuk and gold alongside equities, which tend to respond differently to market stress.
Ongoing review. We continually assess whether the underlying investments remain right for their role. We make changes when the long-term investment case shifts, not simply because markets have become more volatile.
All of this happens within your Shariah investment framework, without you needing to react to a single headline.
The decision you already made
Staying invested through volatility isn't doing nothing. It's keeping a decision you made deliberately, for reasons that haven't changed.
What would change the picture is a change in your life: your goals, your time horizon, your need for cash. If any of those have genuinely shifted, that's worth a conversation, and our team is here for it.
Or explore how your portfolio is built at wahed.com/uk.
But if your reasons for investing are the same today as they were when you first started, then the events of recent weeks are a test the plan was already built to pass.
Amina and Yusuf felt the same fear. Only one of them let it make the decision.
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As with any investment, a Wahed Invest Ltd investment puts your money at risk, as the value of your investment can go down as well as up. The tax treatment of your investment will depend on your individual circumstances and may change in the future. If you are unsure about whether investing is right for you, please seek expert financial advice.
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