The two firms will jointly invest $250 million, which will be seeded between five commodity hedge fund managers on Al-Safi with $50m each for a product to be offered under the Dubai Shariah Asset Management brand.

Al-Safi is a shariah compliant platform with Shariah Capital as the shariah adviser and Barclays Capital as the prime broker and structured product distributor.

Barclays Capital and Shariah Capital launched a derivatives trading platform enabling investors to profit from falling stock markets in a sharia-compliant way in September last year (MEED 14:9:07).

The joint venture Al-Safi platform offers Islamic short-selling - a trade where investors who believe a share price will fall, sell shares at a high price before buying them back when it drops.