Why Halal Stock Screeners Disagree (And How to Read the Disagreement)

Field Notes · 2026-09-21

Open two halal screening apps, check the same ticker, and there's a real chance you get two different answers. This isn't a bug in one of the apps. It's what happens when five legitimate, scholar-authored standards use different denominators and different thresholds to answer a question that has no single canonical numeric answer — only several defensible ones.

Most screening apps pick one standard, apply it silently, and hand you a verdict. When you check a second app and get a different verdict, you have no way to tell whether it's using a different standard, a different data source, or is simply wrong. That's not a criticism of any one app — it's a structural problem with showing a verdict and hiding the arithmetic.

This piece is the arithmetic.

Three denominators, not one

Every mainstream Sharia equity standard measures interest-bearing debt as a share of something. The disagreement starts at of what — and, since 2023, at how many other ratios are checked at all.

Spot market cap (AAOIFI): debt and cash-plus-interest-bearing securities are each measured against today's market capitalization — a number that moves every trading day and has nothing to do with the balance sheet.

Trailing-average market cap (Dow Jones Islamic Market, S&P Shariah): debt is measured against market cap averaged over the trailing 24 months (DJIM) or 36 months (S&P), which damps exactly the price swings the spot version amplifies. In September 2023 both index families also retired their cash and receivables screens, keeping one leverage ratio plus a 5% ceiling on non-permissible revenue. An app still running the pre-2023 rules under the same name will disagree with one running the current ones.

Total assets (MSCI Islamic, FTSE Russell Shariah): debt, cash, and receivables-plus-cash are measured against total assets — a number that only changes when a new filing is published.

That single choice can flip a verdict on its own, with no change to the underlying business at all. A company whose stock price falls 40% in a quarter, with nothing else changing, sees its spot-market-cap ratio get worse purely because the denominator shrank. The trailing-average version moves a fraction as far. The asset-based ratios (MSCI, FTSE) don't move at all. One standard is reading the market's mood today, one is reading its mood over two or three years, and one is reading the balance sheet. Neither is wrong. They're answering with different instruments.

The thresholds aren't identical either

Even within a family, the exact cutoff differs. FTSE Russell's published Shariah screen, for instance, sets debt below 33.333% of total assets, cash plus interest-bearing securities below 33.333% of total assets, and receivables plus cash below 50% of total assets — where the MSCI screen draws that last line at 70%. AAOIFI's ratios, computed against spot market cap, use a commonly-cited 30% line for the debt and cash-and-securities checks; DJIM and S&P draw their debt line at 33%. These are close, not identical — and "close" is exactly where a company sitting near the edge can pass one standard and fail another.

There's also a real, useful distinction in what a name means. Some data providers apply "MSCI Islamic" as a proprietary label to a slightly different rule set than the one MSCI itself publishes — so the same standard's name can mean two different thresholds depending on which app is running it. When two apps disagree and both claim to be running "MSCI," the honest next question isn't "which app is right" — it's "which exact numbers is each one using," and most apps don't show you.

A worked example (illustrative numbers, not a live screen)

Say a company reports $8B in interest-bearing debt, $50B in total assets, and its market cap has fallen from $40B to $22B this year on unrelated bad news.

One disclosure, because auditability cuts both ways: Daleel currently approximates the DJIM and S&P trailing averages with point-in-time market cap, and says so on every result. On this company our DJIM and S&P lines would read 36.4% against the 33% limit — a fail — until the averaged denominator ships. The approximation is conservative in a falling market and lenient in a rising one, which is why it is labeled rather than hidden.

Same company. Same debt. Same filing. Opposite verdicts, produced entirely by which denominator the standard uses and how much the stock price happened to move. Neither number is fabricated and neither app that reports one of these verdicts is lying to you — they're both doing correct arithmetic on a question that has more than one scholarly-defensible framing.

A stock that passes on one screener and fails on another isn't necessarily a disagreement about the company. It's often a disagreement about the question.

What to actually do with the disagreement

  1. Ask which denominator moved. If a verdict flips right after a big price swing with no new filing, that's almost always a market-cap-based ratio reacting to the market, not new information about the business.
  2. Check whether the standards agree on direction even if not on the binary line. A company that's close to every threshold — high 20s, low 30s across the board — is a genuinely different situation from one that's comfortably inside every standard's range or fails all five badly. A single pass/fail label erases that distinction; a 0–100 score doesn't.
  3. Decide which standard you follow, once, deliberately — the way you'd pick a school of fiqh or a scholar to follow on other matters — rather than re-litigating it every time two apps disagree.
  4. Treat cross-referencing as normal, not as a failure of trust. Serious investors already run more than one tool and compare. That's not indecision. It's due diligence on a question where the "right" answer is itself a matter of scholarly judgment (ijtihādī, in the literal sense the standards bodies use) — not a bug to be embarrassed about.

Why we built it to show all five at once

Daleel's answer to "which app is right" is to stop making you guess. Every screen computes AAOIFI, DJIM, MSCI, S&P, and FTSE Russell independently against the same SEC filing data, and shows you every check — value, threshold, pass or fail — for each one. When two standards disagree, you see exactly where: which ratio, which denominator, which line. The 0–100 score exists precisely because a company at 34.9% debt and one at 3% debt both "fail" a binary AAOIFI check, and that's a real difference an investor should be able to see.

We're not trying to replace the app you already use. If you already run Zoya or Musaffa and they've earned your trust, keep using them — the honest use case for Daleel is the moment they disagree with each other, or with your own read of a filing, and you want to see the actual numbers instead of picking a side by faith.

Run a ticker through all five standards yourself: Screen a stock now →. Full threshold definitions and denominators are on the methodology page. Browse pre-computed verdicts for 1,500+ tickers at /is/.

This piece explains methodology mechanics; it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, and none of the standards discussed constitute a fatwa or religious ruling. Consult a qualified scholar for matters of fiqh.

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