How Does Amal Invest Actually Work? A Complete Guide

This guide walks through what actually happens to a fund between the moment you pick it and the moment you own its halal version.

Key Takeaways

  • Amal screens the holdings of popular ETFs and mutual funds for Shariah compliance
  • We rebuild the fund using only the companies that pass
  • You invest through your own broker (Alpaca or Trading212), and automation handles the trades
  • Your portfolio stays synced as compliance ratings and fund holdings change

The short version: we take a fund you already like — the S&P 500, a Fidelity growth fund — remove the holdings that don't pass Shariah screening, and rebuild it from what's left. You end up with a portfolio that behaves a lot like the original, minus the companies you didn't want in it.

Here's how that works in practice.

Fund Filtering: The Purification Process

What We Start With

We start with funds investors already know — FDGRX (Fidelity Growth Company), VDADX (Vanguard Dividend Appreciation), and hundreds of others. They're popular for good reason: diversified, with long track records.

The problem is what's inside them. Open up any of these funds and you'll find banks, breweries, and defense contractors sitting next to the companies you actually want to own.

How the Screening Works

Every holding in the fund gets checked:

Shariah Compliance Screening

At Amal, we currently rely on Shariah compliance data provided by Zoya, which follows the AAOIFI standards. These standards are focused on financial and sector-based screening — for example, looking at interest-based debt levels, impermissible income, and business activity categories (like alcohol, gambling, weapons, etc.). Based on these criteria, companies may be marked as compliant even if they are involved in serious ethical concerns outside the scope of traditional Shariah screening.

Real Talk: What Gets Filtered Out?

From the S&P 500, we typically filter out about 267 companies (53%) as non-compliant, with another 12 companies (2%) marked as doubtful, leaving 222 companies (44%) that are Shariah-compliant. That includes obvious ones like JPMorgan Chase (banking) and Anheuser-Busch (alcohol), but also less obvious ones like Microsoft (due to weapons contracts) and Disney (due to entertainment content concerns).

The Result

What's left is the list of companies that passed. That list becomes the building blocks of your rebuilt fund: same strategy as the original, compliant holdings only.

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Getting Started

The whole setup takes a few minutes:

  1. Choose Your Base Fund: Pick from our selection of reconstructed popular funds
  2. Set Your Investment: Decide how much you want to invest
  3. Connect Your Broker: Link your Alpaca or Trading212 account
  4. Let Us Handle the Rest: We'll build and manage your portfolio automatically

From there, rebalancing, dividend handling, and compliance updates run on their own. You check in when you want to, not because you have to.

Want to see what your favorite ETF looks like after filtering?

Try Amal Invest →

Pick any fund and we'll show you which companies stay, which get filtered out, and how the filtered version would have performed historically — before you put in a dollar.

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