How to use the Investment Intelligence signals — buy zones, take profits, and stops explained.
Pick one or two halal broad-market ETFs — SPUS for US equities, HLAL for global, or a physical gold product like PHYS. Set up automatic purchases on a fixed schedule (monthly, bi-weekly, whatever fits your cash flow). Do not stop during downturns. Hold indefinitely.
That is the whole strategy. No need to watch charts, read signals, or time entries. The discipline is in the consistency, not the analysis.
Until when? Until you reach your goal — retirement, a down payment, financial independence — or indefinitely if you have no specific target. "Time in the market beats timing the market" holds up over every 20-year window we have data for.
Choose 3–5 categories that match your risk level — e.g. halal equities (SPUS/HLAL), gold, Bitcoin, clean energy (ICLN), healthcare (ISRG). Then check the Investment Intelligence tab on whatever schedule fits you: daily, weekly, or once a month. Signals are updated every weekday.
The signals are always current. Come back daily or monthly — the recommendation will reflect today's price and levels whenever you check.
Before any strategy on this page, sit with the evidence. For most people, most of the time, buying a broad index fund on a schedule and leaving it alone beats almost everything else on offer. Not because it is clever, but because almost everything else fails in practice.
That is why roughly 65% of this site's model capital sits in the two simplest sleeves, Core DCA and All-Weather. Everything fancier here has to earn its allocation through live paper trials and explicit kill tests — the swing lab, for instance, dies if it can't beat simply holding SPUS over the same period. The boring thing is the default; any deviation carries the burden of proof.
Everything on this site fits on a ladder, ordered from strongest evidence to weakest. Each level up demands more time and more skill and pays less reliably. Climb only as far as you actually want to work. Stopping at Level 1 is a respectable end state, not a beginner phase.
Level 1 — DCA into halal index ETFs. A fixed amount on a fixed schedule into broad screened funds like SPUS and HLAL. This is where the evidence is deepest, and it is where most of this site's model capital sits.
Level 2 — DCA with pacing and buy zones. Same assets, but the buying is paced: faster when an ETF sits deep in its own drawdown history, slower when it is stretched. Be honest about what this adds — more discipline than return. The pace labels mostly exist so you follow a rule instead of a feeling.
Level 3 — Diversified allocation. Don't be 100% equities. The All-Weather sleeve spreads across halal equities, gold, sukuk, and a small commodity and crypto slice, weighted so no single asset's volatility dominates the portfolio. The payoff is a shallower worst year, which is exactly what keeps the Level 1 habit intact.
Level 4 — Factor tilts. Quality-Value, Momentum, and Trend each carry decades of academic and live evidence. They also carry far more ways to fail in your hands: sloppy execution, fees and taxes eating the edge, and above all quitting the factor during its inevitable multi-year cold streak.
Level 5 — Trading. The swing lab. The smallest sleeve, hard-capped, and explicitly on trial: it must beat just holding the index over the same stretch or it gets killed. Treat it as an experiment with a budget, never as the plan.
Famous investors are usually invoked to sell complexity. Look at what they actually did and said, and most of them map onto the lower rungs of the ladder.
None of these are replicable shortcuts. In every case the actual edge was discipline and a long time horizon. Those cost nothing, and Level 1 already gives you both.
The idea is simple: invest a fixed dollar amount on a fixed schedule, regardless of price. When the price is high, your fixed amount buys fewer units. When the price is low, it buys more.
Over time, your average cost per unit ends up lower than if you had tried to time your entries. More importantly, it removes the paralysis of "is now the right moment?" You don't have to answer that question every time. You just invest on the schedule.
DCA works especially well for assets you believe in long-term. The volatility that makes people nervous is the same volatility that lowers your average cost when you're buying through it consistently.
For the core halal ETFs, the dashboard paces this for you: the 12M column shows a pace label — Accumulate / Normal / Ease — set by how deep each ETF sits in its own drawdown history. Buy faster when it's unusually far below its highs, ease off when it's near them; the Portfolio page tracks the paced plan.
This is a more targeted version of standard DCA. Instead of deploying money on a calendar schedule, you only buy when the price is actually in the buy zone. When price is stretched or extended, you hold cash. When it pulls back to the zone, that's your deployment signal.
In practice, the Investment Intelligence tab does the work for you. When an asset appears in the "Act Today" tier with a buy zone active, that's the moment to deploy. When nothing is in Act Today, you hold cash and wait.
The tradeoff is that if an asset never returns to its buy zone, you sit in cash. That's a cost worth paying for the assets where you care about entry price, less so for assets you'd hold regardless.
Don't deploy your whole earmarked budget on the first zone touch. Split it into three to five portions and put them to work progressively as price moves deeper into the zone. The principle is straightforward: smaller portions near the top of the zone, where you're paying close to the worst entry the zone allows, and larger portions near the bottom, where you're closer to where you'd actually be stopped out if the thesis breaks.
The default is four portions of 25%. Deploy the first 25% on the first zone entry, another 25% on a meaningful dip within the zone (or on the next re-entry if price escapes briefly), and so on until you're fully in. If your conviction is high or the zone is tight, three portions of roughly 33% each cover it without overthinking the math. For wide zones where you expect multiple pullbacks over weeks, five portions of 20% give you more granularity.
A few practical things to keep in mind. Don't average down past the stop — if price breaks below it, the thesis is broken, and the system treats the stop as a hard line for a reason. Track zone depth rather than calendar days: the dashboard shows a zone_pct value (0% at buy_low, 100% at buy_high), and your bigger portions should go in when that number is low. And when TP1 hits and you take partial profit, the 50% exit applies to what you've actually deployed, not your original $500 — any dry portions roll back into your cash bucket for the next setup.
The targets aren't pulled out of a hat — and they're not hand-set either. Every trading day, each traded watchlist asset's levels — buy zone, TP1, TP2, stop — are recomputed from price structure, so they can never go stale. Here's the recipe.
The Buy/Hold/Sell verdict is computed the same morning, from trend × zone location × market regime × risk guards (earnings within 14 days, a hard negative shift in analyst revisions, falling-knife and overbought vetoes). There are two ways to earn a Buy: a pullback — price inside the buy zone with the trend up — or a breakout — a settled close above the prior 20-day high. A Sell needs persistence, so a single bad close can't whipsaw you: either a settled close at least 1% below the stop, or two consecutive settled closes below both the 50- and 200-day averages. The AI layer can only downgrade a verdict for a nameable news risk; it can never upgrade one.
Only the 1M horizon carries trade levels. The 12M column is a DCA pace label — Accumulate / Normal / Ease — set by how deep the asset sits in its own drawdown history. It paces long-term buying (faster when an asset is far below its highs, easier when it's stretched); it has no targets or stop and never tells you to sell. The core halal ETFs only ever get the pace label — they belong to the long-term accumulation plan, not the trading book.
The point of explicit TP1 and TP2 levels — computed by the same rules every single day — is to remove the "what should I do here" question at the moment of action. When the dashboard says "Near TP1" or "Above TP1", you already know what to do, because the level came from a fixed recipe rather than from how anyone feels in the heat of the moment. The methodology is boring on purpose. Boring is what survives.
When price hits the first target, sell part of the position. A common split is 50% at TP1. The exact percentage matters less than the habit of actually doing it.
Here is why it works psychologically: once you've taken profit at TP1, the remaining half of the position is running on house money. You've already locked in a real gain. If the trade then reverses and hits your stop (now moved to breakeven), you walk away with profit in hand. You cannot lose on the overall trade at that point.
Trying to hold for a grand slam exit at TP2 from the start sounds better in theory. In practice, most people watch the trade run to TP1, not sell, and then watch it come back and stop them out at breakeven. Selling half at TP1 captures real value and makes it emotionally possible to hold the rest.
The alternative — hold through TP1 and keep adding: if you are in long-term accumulation mode on a high-conviction halal asset (a core ETF, BTC as a multi-year hold, physical gold), TP1 is less relevant. The better mental model is: set a buy zone, keep adding on every pullback, and never sell. The upside is that compounding runs uninterrupted with no tax drag and no re-entry timing risk. The downside is that if the trade reverses before your thesis plays out you ride the full pullback with no locked profit. Decide before you enter which mode you are in — active trade (use TP1 discipline) or long-term accumulation (focus on the buy zone and sizing, ignore the exit targets).
TP2 is the full exit for most positions. Once you're here, the trade has done what it was supposed to do. Take the money.
The case for holding a small runner past TP2: if there's strong momentum, high conviction, and a clear catalyst still in play, you might let 10–20% of the position run with a tight trailing stop. Most of the time, though, it is not worth the complication. Close the trade, log the win, and wait for the next setup.
The main mistake people make at TP2 is getting greedy. You can always re-enter when the asset comes back to the buy zone. That is a complete trade cycle, and there is nothing wrong with starting a new one.
Holding past TP2 and continuing to add: valid for core positions where the long-term thesis is intact. Instead of selling, you let the position compound and continue buying on pullbacks to the buy zone. The risk is real — a large, unsold position with no exit rule can give back years of gains if the thesis breaks. If you take this approach, replace the price-based TP2 exit with a thesis-based exit: define in advance what would genuinely change your conviction (a failed halal screening, a major structural shift in the business, a macro regime change) and commit to exiting if that trigger is met. That is your stop, just measured in conviction rather than price.
After you exit at TP1 or TP2, price often eventually cycles back to the buy zone. That is your re-entry. This is one of the most underused parts of a systematic approach.
The rule for buybacks: wait for price to actually reach the zone. Don't chase it halfway down. If it looks like it's heading back to your target but hasn't arrived yet, that's not a signal. The signal is when the level is reached.
The history panel on each asset card shows prior signals and entries. Use it to see whether that asset has historically cycled through the buy zone multiple times. Most of the watchlist assets do.
Set your stop before you enter. Not after. The decision of where your stop goes should be made when you're calm, not in the middle of a drawdown.
The stop level on the dashboard is the level where the trade idea has failed. Below that point, the setup no longer makes sense. If you find yourself rationalizing why the stop "doesn't count this time," that's a warning sign.
Once TP1 is hit and you've sold half the position, move the stop on the remaining half to your entry price. This is called moving to breakeven. From that point on, the remaining position can only give back profits from TP1, not your original capital. You cannot lose on the trade overall.
When a hard stop works against you: for long-term, high-conviction positions in fundamentally sound assets — a diversified halal ETF, physical gold, or a conservatively sized screened stock you plan to hold for years — a mechanical stop can be counterproductive. It exits you at the moment volatility is highest, which is often when you should be adding rather than selling. A 20% pullback in SPUS is not a failed trade thesis; it is a buying opportunity. The rule of thumb: use stops for active swing trades and defined short-term setups; skip them (or set them very wide at a structural level) for core long-term positions where a drawdown deepens your conviction rather than breaking it.
The standard rule: risk 1–2% of your account on any single trade. Not 1–2% of account value per trade, but 1–2% of account value in potential loss.
Here is how it works. Your account is $10,000. You're willing to risk 1% per trade, so $100. You enter an asset at $80 with a stop at $70. That's $10 of risk per unit. You can buy 10 units ($100 / $10 = 10). Your notional position is $800 (10 units × $80), but your maximum loss if the stop is hit is only $100, which is exactly your 1%.
The position calculator in the dashboard does this math automatically. Enter your account size and risk percentage once and it shows suggested units for every asset with an active buy zone. The point of doing it this way is that a $50 stock and a $5,000 asset both get sized to the same dollar risk. You're not risking more just because the price is higher.
What this achieves over time: a string of losses does not blow up the account, because each loss is capped. And the winners, which also compound at the same account size, can grow the account meaningfully.
No single asset should make or break your portfolio. Spreading across uncorrelated assets is the closest thing to a free lunch in investing — you reduce overall volatility without necessarily sacrificing returns.
The watchlist covers four distinct categories. A diversified approach allocates across all of them, not just the one that performed best last year:
The 1M and 12M horizons on the dashboard serve a diversification function too. Short-term (1M) setups are active trades with tighter stops. Long-term (12M) positions are strategic holds. Running both simultaneously means you are not entirely exposed to a single time frame's volatility.
An ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund) holds dozens or hundreds of stocks inside a single ticker. When you buy SPUS, you are buying a small slice of hundreds of halal-screened US companies at once. When you buy NVDA, you own one company.
For beginners, ETFs are almost always the right starting point:
Individual stocks (NVDA, TSLA on this watchlist) offer higher potential upside — a single company can 5× in a year in a way a diversified ETF cannot. But that same concentration works in reverse. A stock can drop 50–70% on a single earnings miss or sector rotation.
The halal ETFs on this watchlist track conventional benchmarks (S&P 500, Nasdaq, global equities) after removing non-compliant companies. Historically, Shariah-screened indexes have performed comparably to or slightly better than their conventional counterparts over full market cycles — largely because they naturally exclude highly leveraged financial companies.
Key facts on the ETFs tracked in this dashboard, plus Canadian options. MER (Management Expense Ratio) is the annual fee skimmed off fund assets — a 0.49% MER costs you about $49 a year on every $10,000 invested, so lower is better. Inception is when the fund first listed; younger funds simply haven't existed long enough to have meaningful longer-window returns, so you'll see "Too new" entries below for any window that pre-dates the fund. Returns are price-only and pulled from Yahoo on the day this page was built (2026-05-29) — they don't include reinvested distributions or currency effects. WSHR is listed in CAD while the USD ETFs are in USD, so the numbers across currencies aren't strictly apples-to-apples.
| Ticker | Name | Category | MER | Inception | 6M | 12M | 5Y | What it holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPUS USD |
SP Funds S&P 500 Sharia ETF | US Large-Cap Equities | ~0.49% | Dec 2019 (6.4y) | +15.2% | +39.9% | +115.1% | S&P 500 screened by AAOIFI Shariah standards. Excludes financials, alcohol, tobacco, weapons. Closest halal equivalent to SPY. |
| HLAL USD |
Wahed FTSE USA Shariah ETF | US Equities | ~0.50% | Jul 2019 (6.9y) | +18.1% | +42.1% | +100.5% | FTSE USA Shariah screened. Uses a tighter filter than SPUS — smaller, more concentrated portfolio of compliant US names. |
| SPTE USD |
SP Funds Global Tech Sharia ETF | Global Technology | ~0.49% | Dec 2023 (2.5y) | +41.1% | +69.5% | Too new | Tech-sector focus, Shariah screened. Halal alternative to QQQ/VGT. Overweights semiconductors, software, and hardware. |
| SPRE USD |
SP Funds S&P Global REIT Sharia ETF | Global REITs | ~0.49% | Dec 2020 (5.4y) | +7.8% | +8.9% | −5.9% | Real estate exposure through Shariah-compliant REITs. Screens out conventional mortgage and highly leveraged property companies. |
| UMMA USD |
Wahed Dow Jones Islamic World ETF | Global Equities | ~0.50% | Jan 2022 (4.4y) | +35.8% | +49.9% | Too new | Broad global equity exposure, Dow Jones Islamic screened. Diversifies beyond North America — includes Europe, Asia, EM. |
| SPWO USD |
SP Funds World (ex-US) ETF | International ex-US Equities | ~0.49% | Dec 2023 (2.4y) | +28.4% | +45.2% | Too new | International developed and emerging market equities, Shariah screened. Reduces home-country bias for US investors. |
| SPSK USD Bond |
SP Funds Dow Jones Global Sukuk ETF | Islamic Fixed Income | ~0.49% | Dec 2019 (6.4y) | −2.8% | −0.1% | −9.7% | The only US-listed halal bond fund. Invests in Sukuk (Islamic bonds), which pay profit-sharing returns instead of interest. Lower volatility than equities. |
| MNZL USD |
Manzil Russell Halal USA Broad Market ETF | US Halal Equity | ~0.49% | Nov 2025 (0.5y) | +17.0% | Too new | Too new | US-listed on Nasdaq. Broad-market US equity ETF, Shariah-screened by Manzil. Not on Canadian exchanges — requires a USD account or FX conversion. |
| WSHR CAD |
Wealthsimple Shariah World Equity Index ETF | Canadian Halal Equity (Global) | 0.56% | May 2021 (5.0y) | +2.5% | +4.7% | +31.9% | Canadian-listed on NEO Exchange — the main CAD-denominated halal equity option. Tracks the Dow Jones Islamic Market Developed Markets Quality & Low Volatility Index. Screened twice yearly by Rating Intelligence. TFSA & RRSP eligible. |
A few things to notice in the numbers. SPTE is the standout for shorter horizons — a tech-overweight fund inheriting the AI rally. SPSK is the only consistent negative across all three windows; that's the cost of holding sukuk during a multi-year rising-rate environment, which is exactly the dynamic Islamic fixed-income investors will recognize from conventional bond drawdowns over the same period. SPRE's negative 5-year reflects the brutal 2022-2023 REIT cycle that has only partially recovered. The funds that launched into the recent bull market (SPTE, SPWO, MNZL) show strong since-inception numbers but don't have full-cycle data yet — treat them as promising rather than proven.
For Canadian investors: all USD-listed ETFs above (SPUS, HLAL, SPTE, SPRE, UMMA, SPWO, SPSK, MNZL) are accessible through most Canadian brokers — Questrade, Interactive Brokers, WealthSimple Trade — but they trade in USD, so you'll pay an FX cost on the conversion. Using Norbert's Gambit (journaling DLR/DLR.U at Questrade) gets you close to the interbank rate and avoids most of the spread. WSHR is the primary CAD-listed halal equity ETF on the NEO Exchange — no FX needed. WealthSimple also runs a managed Halal Portfolio for hands-off investors who'd rather not manage individual ETF positions themselves.
Before picking assets, you need to pick the right account type. The account determines whether your gains are taxed — and for most Canadians, getting this right is worth more than any single trade idea.
Account types
Broker comparison
| Broker | ETF Buys | Stock Trade | USD ETF Cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WealthSimple Trade | Free | Free | 1.5% FX on USD | Absolute beginners; CAD-listed ETFs (WSHR, MNT.TO). Avoid for SPUS/HLAL — the 1.5% FX fee adds up fast. |
| Questrade | Free | Free since Feb 2025 | ~0.2% via Norbert's Gambit | Best overall for halal ETF investors. Commission-free for all stocks & ETFs (buys and sells) + very low USD conversion via Norbert's Gambit = lowest total cost for SPUS, HLAL, PHYS. |
| TD Easy Trade | 50 free/yr, then $9.99 | 50 free/yr, then $9.99 | Varies (~1.5–2%) | TD banking customers who want everything in one place. Higher fees but simple integration with TD bank accounts. |
| CIBC Investor's Edge | $6.95 | $6.95 | Varies | Cheapest among the Big 6 banks. Good if you prefer a bank-backed platform but want lower fees than TD/RBC/BMO. |
| Interactive Brokers | ~$1–2 | ~$1–2 | Very low (~0.02%) | Best FX rates and lowest fees for active/experienced investors. Steeper learning curve — not beginner-friendly. |
For investors who want to avoid the scholarly difference of opinion (ikhtilaf) on equity investing entirely, physical gold and silver are the most unambiguous halal asset class.
There is near-universal scholarly consensus that owning gold and silver is permissible — they are the historical monetary standard of Islamic civilization (the silver dirham and gold dinar). There is no revenue stream to screen, no debt ratio to calculate, no business model to evaluate. You simply own a real, tangible asset.
Holding physical gold & silver inside your TFSA or RRSP
You do not need to store coins at home. The products below let you hold physical metal through your brokerage account — TFSA and RRSP eligible at Questrade and most major brokers. The key Shariah distinction is allocation structure: fully allocated means specific numbered bars are assigned to you; a pool means you own an undivided interest with no identified bars. AAOIFI Standard No. 57 requires full allocation for permissible gold ownership.
The products above give you genuine exposure to physical metal — not a futures contract, not a synthetic derivative. This is meaningfully different from commodity futures ETFs (which roll contracts and incur contango drag). The Halal tab has a full product comparison with all fees and a full Shariah ranking.
For the strictest Shariah compliance: use Questrade's Trade Desk with segregated storage — your specific numbered bars, physical delivery at 1 oz minimum, TFSA/RRSP eligible. For smaller amounts where the 1.50%/yr storage cost is prohibitive, PHYS (gold) and PSLV (silver) are the best ETF alternatives — the trust holds fully allocated metal, though you own fund units rather than specific bars. MNT.TO/MNTS.TO are practical for CAD-denominated access but use pool structures (Sharia concern).
All of the strategies above assume long-only cash positions. No leverage, no margin, no short selling. That also happens to be exactly what Shariah-compliant investing requires, so halal investors can use every strategy on this page without modification.
Short selling (betting on a price decline) is also not permissible under most Shariah screens. The dashboard does not include short setups. All signals are long-side only.
For the Halal ETFs on the watchlist: they screen out companies with significant revenue from alcohol, tobacco, weapons, conventional finance, and entertainment. Screening methodologies vary by fund. If compliance matters to you for religious reasons, always verify the current screening criteria directly with the fund provider, as holdings can drift between rebalancing dates.