Recession-resistant value investing
Shari’ah-compliant stock selection
Personalized portfolio management
Islamic Value Investing Portfolio
Halal Investing Criteria
All-Terrain Value Investing
Custom-Tailored Portfolios
Safe & Secure

Halal Investing Criteria

We do not outsource Islamic certification of stocks. We dig deep into company’s filings and do our own investigative research. Our Shari’ah-compliant portfolio simply takes our conventional portfolio stocks and removes companies whose:

  1. 1. Primary business is in Islamically impermissible (haram) industries (like banking, insurance, alcohol, pork, arms, pornography, entertainment, etc)
  2. 2. Debt exceeds 37% of assets
  3. 3. Haram investments exceed 33% of assets
  4. 4. Haram income exceeds 5% of total revenue
  5. 5. Illiquid assets are less than 25% of total assets
  6. 6. Market cap is less than or equal to its net liquid assets

This portfolio will not use any derivative instruments (options or futures) or interest-bearing instruments such as bonds and money market funds.

Our detailed quarterly client letters will also provide a “Shari’ah compliance” checklist for all the stocks in your portfolio.

Since we provide individualized portfolios, you can always specify additional requirements, or request capital gains or losses for tax purposes.

All-Terrain Value Investing

Our investing approach is based on value investment principles popularized by Warren Buffett.

We design portfolios that can weather any twists and turns in the economy, because we only invest in high-quality, undervalued companies that can survive the worst crises.

Read more about our investment approach.

Custom-Tailored Portfolios

We’re not a mutual fund where everyone owns the same stocks. Instead, we create a customized portfolio for each client. This means that:

  • We won’t waste your money on stocks that are no longer undervalued just because existing clients bought them at a lower price.
  • We can skip purchases of stocks you don’t want to buy. We can also make sure you make capital gains or losses for tax purposes. 
  • You’ll receive a detailed quarterly letter explaining our investment choices and their Shari’ah compliance.

Read more about our client experience.

Safe & Secure

Your wealth is entirely secure with us, because:

  • We don’t custody your assets; they are in brokerage accounts (Fidelity or Schwab) under your name. Our agreement gives us only a limited power of attorney to enter buy and sell orders. We cannot disburse funds.
  • We eat our own cooking: both Founder Michael Conn and CEO Vitaliy Katsenelson have most of their assets invested in IMA portfolios. We truly believe that this is the only sane way to invest in today’s markets (see our conflicts of interest disclosure).
  • We’ve been in the business since 1979 and have over $150M in assets under management.
Halal Investing Criteria

Halal Investing Criteria

We do not outsource Islamic certification of stocks. We dig deep into company’s filings and do our own investigative research. Our Shari’ah-compliant portfolio simply takes our conventional portfolio stocks and removes companies whose:

  1. 1. Primary business is in Islamically impermissible (haram) industries (like banking, insurance, alcohol, pork, arms, pornography, entertainment, etc)
  2. 2. Debt exceeds 37% of assets
  3. 3. Haram investments exceed 33% of assets
  4. 4. Haram income exceeds 5% of total revenue
  5. 5. Illiquid assets are less than 25% of total assets
  6. 6. Market cap is less than or equal to its net liquid assets

This portfolio will not use any derivative instruments (options or futures) or interest-bearing instruments such as bonds and money market funds.

Our detailed quarterly client letters will also provide a “Shari’ah compliance” checklist for all the stocks in your portfolio.

Since we provide individualized portfolios, you can always specify additional requirements, or request capital gains or losses for tax purposes.

All-Terrain Value Investing

All-Terrain Value Investing

Our investing approach is based on value investment principles popularized by Warren Buffett.

We design portfolios that can weather any twists and turns in the economy, because we only invest in high-quality, undervalued companies that can survive the worst crises.

Read more about our investment approach.

Custom-Tailored Portfolios

Custom-Tailored Portfolios

We’re not a mutual fund where everyone owns the same stocks. Instead, we create a customized portfolio for each client. This means that:

  • We won’t waste your money on stocks that are no longer undervalued just because existing clients bought them at a lower price.
  • We can skip purchases of stocks you don’t want to buy. We can also make sure you make capital gains or losses for tax purposes. 
  • You’ll receive a detailed quarterly letter explaining our investment choices and their Shari’ah compliance.

Read more about our client experience.

Safe & Secure

Safe & Secure

Your wealth is entirely secure with us, because:

  • We don’t custody your assets; they are in brokerage accounts (Fidelity or Schwab) under your name. Our agreement gives us only a limited power of attorney to enter buy and sell orders. We cannot disburse funds.
  • We eat our own cooking: both Founder Michael Conn and CEO Vitaliy Katsenelson have most of their assets invested in IMA portfolios. We truly believe that this is the only sane way to invest in today’s markets (see our conflicts of interest disclosure).
  • We’ve been in the business since 1979 and have over $150M in assets under management.
REQUEST MORE INFORMATION FEES & ACCOUNT MINIMUMS
             

What does a value investing firm in Denver, Colorado know about Islamic investing?

Well, we did not wake up one day and decide to do Islamic investing. We were approached by a prospect who asked us if we could construct a Sharia-compliant portfolio for him. He told us that he felt our value investing principles aligned well with Islamic principles because we approached stocks as businesses, not as speculative pieces of paper or electronic tickers that were going to flip tomorrow. As a devout Muslim, it was important to him that his life savings were invested according to the ethics of Islam. He could relate to the ethical principles of IMA as a firm, and to our “soul in the game” approach to investing.

Though Sharia-compliant investing was new to us, custom-tailored portfolios were not. IMA has been building them since the company’s inception in 1979. We applied value investing principles (described in our Six Commandments of Value Investing) to build portfolios that were designed to produce good returns without taking excessive risk. Instead of using our own ethical filters, which may not have been compatible with our clients’, we put our clients in charge of the ethics of what they own.

Unlike mutual funds or hedge funds that have all their clients owning the same assets, IMA’s client portfolios reside in the client’s name at a discount brokerage firm. Some clients gave us carte blanche. Others ask us not to buy tobacco or gun stocks. Some say tobacco is fine but no defense stocks. We don’t judge; we just apply their ethical principles to their portfolios. As we looked at the rules of Islamic investing, we found that they were very discrete and specific. They do of course require an extra layer of research.

Our research process is very straightforward, and we’ll continue with our traditional process of looking for high-quality undervalued companies, then applying the systematic approach we developed to filter out companies that do not conform to the principles of Islamic investing. At times, when a stock falls in the grey (ambiguous) area of the law, we’ll err on the side of caution.

We decided to take this process a step further for our Muslim clients. For every stock in a Sharia-compliant portfolio, we’ll provide a due diligence checklist. We want our clients to have the comfort of being certain that what they own has been thoroughly vetted according to the principles of Islamic investing.

We have always valued transparency. We want our clients to know what they own and, as importantly, why they own it. We invest a considerable amount of time and effort to bring our clients into the fold of our thinking by writing them comprehensive letters that review the decisions we’ve made in their portfolios and the reasoning behind those decisions. (These letters are 15 to 30 pages long. Here is a sample of one such letter for our conventional clients).

If this is something that piqued your interest, you can get in touch with us using the form below. We try to reply within one business day.

Thanks for considering IMA,

Vitaliy Katsenelson

Account Minimums & Fees

Clients must invest a minimum of $500,000, which can be separated into multiple accounts of at least $100,000 each.

Opening Aggregate Account Balance$500,000 – $2,000,000$2,000,000 and above$10,000,000 and more
Account Fees1.5% on the first $1,000,000
1% from $1,000,000 and above		1%Fees Negotiable

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    Investment Management Associates, Inc. - A Premier Value Investing Firm