Why do halal stock screeners disagree on the same stock?

Same filings, different arithmetic. Every screener reads the same balance sheet and income statement; the disagreement starts with what it does to them. AAOIFI Shari'a Standard No. 21 divides interest-bearing debt and interest-bearing deposits by market capitalization and caps each at 30%, with impermissible income capped at 5% of revenue. The Dow Jones Islamic Market methodology divides by a 24-month average market capitalization and caps debt, cash plus interest-bearing securities, and receivables at 33% each. S&P Shariah uses a 36-month average and 33% for debt and cash, with 49% for receivables. MSCI Islamic divides by total assets at one-third for debt, cash and receivables. FTSE Shariah divides by total assets with one-third for debt and cash and one-half for receivables plus cash. All four cap impermissible income at 5%. A company with a modest market value and a large asset base, or the reverse, can therefore pass one screen and fail another without anyone misreading a filing.

Revenue classification is where the big names split. The standards agree on the prohibited list (alcohol, pork, gambling, conventional finance, adult content, tobacco) and leave the edges to judgment. Is video-game revenue permissible? Is a streaming library? Alcohol sold by a grocery subsidiary or by third-party sellers on a marketplace? Defense contracting? Advertising for prohibited products? A screener that counts more of those lines as impermissible produces a higher prohibited-income figure, and on a company with thin margins of safety that pushes the label from halal to doubtful or non-compliant. That is the disagreement behind Microsoft (gaming), Amazon (first-party grocery alcohol, streamed entertainment and interest on seller financing) and the aerospace names (defense revenue). HalalScreener applies the standard as written: the business screen looks at what the company itself primarily sells and operates, interest income and identifiable revenue from prohibited goods count toward the 5% test, and the live result is shown on each stock page. A stricter personal classification is a legitimate filter to apply on top of that verdict.

Buffers, dates and data. Every AAOIFI ratio has market capitalization underneath it, so a verdict can move on a price swing alone. Screeners handle that differently. HalalScreener publishes a stricter verdict the moment a ratio crosses its line and relaxes it only once the ratio has cleared the line by 1.5 points of market capitalization; the S&P Shariah methodology keeps a company compliant while it sits within a two-point band of the leverage limit. Screeners also re-screen on different days, so one may be reading the latest quarterly filing while another is still on the previous one, and the income test can be read on a trailing-twelve-month basis or on the last annual report. This is why every verdict here carries a screen date: two verdicts dated weeks apart are not necessarily in conflict.

What to do when two screeners disagree. First, find which of the four it is. If one shows the debt ratio near a limit and the other does not, it is the denominator or the date. If both show comfortable ratios and still differ, it is revenue classification, and the question becomes whether you share the stricter view. The stock page here shows the debt ratio against the 30% line and the screen date for free, so the comparison takes a minute. Second, remember what a screener is: a transparent application of a published standard, not a certification. HalalScreener screens, it does not certify. Third, purify either way: a stock that passes still carries a small prohibited-income share to give away.

Sunni and Ja'fari. Most screener disagreements are arguments inside the Sunni AAOIFI family about thresholds and classification. The Ja'fari school followed by Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani adds a different kind of difference: it has no codified percentage thresholds and frames the question around the company's primary activity and the shareholder's own participation in the interest-based portion, and its published rulings on interest taken from a non-Muslim can place a company's interest income on a different footing. Our comparison of Sunni and Ja'fari screening sets that out in full. Followers should apply the guidance of their own marja rather than any screener's label.