This is an original data study. We took every US-listed stock in the invest-like.com universe (12,543 tickers as of 26 May 2026) and ran each one through two completely independent screens.
The first screen is AAOIFI Standard 21, the published Shariah governance standard issued by the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions. It is the most widely cited rule set for whether a public equity is halal-compliant on business activity and on balance-sheet ratios.
The second screen is the seven-framework value-investing consensus we published earlier this week: a stock has to pass the documented criteria of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Philip Fisher, Peter Lynch, Joel Greenblatt, Charlie Munger, and Terry Smith, all at a B-minus or better grade.
Then we asked the question no public source we are aware of has run the numbers on: what is the overlap?
The answer is much larger than we expected, and the structure of the overlap is informative on its own. Here is the full study.
TL;DR
- 43 of the 48 US-listed stocks that pass all 7 value-investing frameworks at score >= 60 are also AAOIFI-Standard-21 halal-compliant. That is 89.6 percent overlap at the all-7-agree level. The five non-halal exceptions are Hilton (lodging), Philip Morris (tobacco), Sezzle (BNPL lending), Neptune Insurance, and Postal Realty Trust (REIT debt).
- 3,573 of the 12,543-stock universe (28.5 percent) pass the AAOIFI Standard 21 halal screen. Excluding the 4,882 stocks with insufficient data to score, the rate is 46.9 percent. The single biggest cause of non-compliance is balance-sheet leverage: the median non-compliant stock carries an interest-bearing-debt-to-total-assets ratio of 63.3 percent. The median halal-compliant stock carries 11.2 percent.
- Financial Services collapses from 50.5 percent of the unfiltered universe to 9.6 percent of the halal cohort. That is the single largest sector reweighting any value-investing tool produces. Healthcare and Technology together rise from 17.0 percent of the universe to 47.0 percent of the halal cohort.
- The 8 stocks that are both halal-compliant and grade-A on Buffett-Fit: FICO (85), MA (84), FTNT (83), TPL (81), ADSK (80), WINA (80), KLAC (80), MSCI (80). The median market cap of this cohort is $46.9 billion. Six are software or platforms with capital-light economics.
The rest of the post shows the methodology, the full distribution, the named tickers, the sector reweighting, and how anyone can reproduce these numbers through the public API.
Dated snapshot: the underlying halal classifications and framework scores were last refreshed on 26 May 2026. Citations of specific counts below are stable against that snapshot. The exact intersection list, sector mix, and per-framework pass rates will drift over time as fundamentals get re-ingested and as new tickers cross thresholds.
Methodology
The data study covers the 12,543 stocks in the invest-like.com primary universe.
What AAOIFI Standard 21 is
AAOIFI Standard 21 (sometimes cited as the AAOIFI Shariah Standard on Equity Investment in Listed Companies, in the AAOIFI Shariah Standards collection) is the most widely adopted public-equity halal-screening framework. It has two layers of filter.
The first layer is a business-activity screen. A company is not halal-compliant if its primary business is interest-bearing finance (conventional banks, conventional insurance, lenders, brokers earning interest spread), alcohol, tobacco, conventional gambling, pork-related food production, adult entertainment, or weapons manufacturing classified outside defensive use. The activity screen is binary. A small percentage of revenue from a non-compliant secondary activity is tolerated up to roughly the 5 percent threshold, but a primary classification in any of these categories is disqualifying.
The second layer is the financial-ratio screen. Even a company in a permitted industry is non-compliant if it carries too much interest-bearing debt, holds too much in interest-bearing securities relative to its market cap, or generates more than a small fraction of its income from interest. The most commonly cited threshold is 33 percent of total assets for interest-bearing debt, although different scholarly bodies use slightly different cutoffs. The invest-like halal screen documents the specific implementation at /halal/ and the methodology deep dive at /blog/halal-screening-methodology-deep-dive/.
In our database, the halal_status column has four values: compliant, non_compliant, questionable (passes the activity screen but is near the financial-ratio threshold), and insufficient_data (we cannot confidently classify). For this study, "halal" means compliant only. Questionable and insufficient-data stocks are excluded from the halal cohort.
What the 7-framework consensus is
We score every stock against seven independently implemented value-investing frameworks: Buffett's quality-and-moat lens, Graham's defensive-investor screen, Fisher's growth-quality test, Lynch's growth-at-a-reasonable-price thesis, Greenblatt's Magic Formula, Munger's mental-models filter, and Smith's Fundsmith framework. Each framework returns a 0-to-100 score, an A through F letter grade, and a verdict.
The full methodology hub is at /methodology/. The 7-framework cross-consensus study we published earlier this week is at /blog/12500-stocks-7-frameworks-cross-framework-consensus/.
Pass threshold. A stock "passes a framework" at score >= 60 on the 0-to-100 scale, which maps to a B-minus or better letter grade. That is the same threshold we used in the prior 7-framework study so the numbers stack consistently.
Apples-to-apples cohort. The 7 frameworks have different data requirements. Munger, Smith, and Fisher require deeper fundamentals, so they are scored on fewer stocks than Buffett, Graham, Greenblatt, and Lynch. The "all 7" intersection therefore restricts to stocks that have been scored on every one of the seven frameworks. That apples-to-apples cohort is 6,621 stocks in the full universe and 3,477 stocks in the halal subset.
Headline finding 1: 89.6 percent of the all-7 consensus list is halal-compliant
There are 48 US-listed stocks that pass all seven value-investing frameworks at a B-minus or better. 43 of them (89.6 percent) are AAOIFI-Standard-21 halal-compliant.
The five stocks that pass all seven value-investing frameworks but fail the halal screen are:
| Ticker | Company | Sector | Halal-fail reason |
|---|
| HLT | Hilton Worldwide | Consumer Cyclical | Lodging revenue mix (alcohol service in hotels) |
| PM | Philip Morris International | Consumer Defensive | Tobacco (primary business) |
| SEZL | Sezzle Inc. | Financial Services | Buy-now-pay-later interest-bearing lending |
| NP | Neptune Insurance Holdings | Technology | Insurance underwriting (conventional, not takaful) |
| PSTL | Postal Realty Trust | Real Estate | REIT debt-to-asset ratio above threshold |
The 89.6 percent overlap is the most surprising number in this study. The prior intuition (mine, before running the query) was that value-investing screens and halal screens would produce mostly disjoint cohorts, because classical value investing leans on financial-services names like Berkshire's bank holdings, and halal screening filters out financial services aggressively. The data says the opposite: when both screens are pushed to their strictest published settings simultaneously, the survivors are almost entirely halal-compliant by construction.
The reason this works falls out of the same data. Cross-framework value-investing consensus selects for businesses with high return on invested capital and low interest-bearing debt. AAOIFI Standard 21 also selects for low interest-bearing debt (33 percent of assets as the standard threshold) and rules out interest-spread-based business models. The two screens are not designed to overlap, but they share two key filters in common: balance-sheet conservatism and avoidance of finance-as-primary-activity.
Headline finding 2: 28.5 percent of the universe is halal-compliant
Across the full 12,543-stock invest-like universe:
| Halal status | Stock count | Share |
|---|
| Compliant | 3,573 | 28.49% |
| Non-compliant | 3,283 | 26.18% |
| Questionable | 755 | 6.02% |
| Insufficient data | 4,882 | 38.92% |
| Unknown | 50 | 0.40% |
Excluding the insufficient-data block (mostly recent IPOs, ADRs with sparse financial coverage, and micro-caps where we cannot confidently classify), the compliant share rises to 46.9 percent. That is a substantially higher base rate than most retail investors expect. The intuition that "almost no US stocks are halal" is wrong. The intuition that "halal restricts your investable universe to a small fraction" is closer to right, but only modestly so once you exclude the data-poor tail.
The single largest cause of non-compliance is balance-sheet leverage. The median interest-bearing-debt-to-total-assets ratio for halal-compliant stocks is 11.2 percent. The median for non-compliant stocks is 63.3 percent. The AAOIFI threshold of roughly 33 percent of assets is therefore not a knife-edge filter; it is a clean separator between two distinct populations of public companies.
Headline finding 3: the halal cohort is healthcare-and-tech-heavy
The sector tilt of the 3,573-stock halal cohort is dramatically different from the unfiltered US universe.
| Sector | Universe share | Halal-cohort share | Reweighting |
|---|
| Healthcare | 9.68% | 26.73% | +17.05 pp |
| Technology | 7.30% | 20.24% | +12.94 pp |
| Industrials | 6.21% | 12.54% | +6.33 pp |
| Consumer Cyclical | 4.67% | 8.65% | +3.98 pp |
| Basic Materials | 2.33% | 5.99% | +3.66 pp |
| Energy | 2.43% | 5.12% | +2.69 pp |
| Communication Services | 2.24% | 4.34% | +2.10 pp |
| Consumer Defensive | 2.09% | 3.89% | +1.80 pp |
| Utilities | 1.12% | 0.90% | -0.22 pp |
| Real Estate | 2.58% | 2.02% | -0.56 pp |
| Financial Services | 50.48% | 9.60% | -40.88 pp |
Financial Services drops by 40.9 percentage points. That is the single largest sector reweighting any production-grade stock-screening tool produces in our experience. The mechanic is clean: AAOIFI Standard 21 rules out the entire interest-spread side of finance (commercial banks, conventional insurers, asset managers earning interest on float, BNPL lenders, broker-dealers booking interest income), which is the dominant share of the US listed financial-services count. What survives is a narrow strip of payment-network and exchange-and-data businesses (Visa, Mastercard, MSCI, Sprott) plus some asset-light specialty-finance niches.
The rebalance fills in elsewhere. Healthcare almost triples its weight (9.7 percent to 26.7 percent), because most healthcare names have low interest-bearing debt and clean business-activity profiles. Technology nearly triples (7.3 percent to 20.2 percent), for the same reason. Industrials, basic materials, and energy all gain meaningful share. Utilities and real estate barely move, because both sectors have a long tail of debt-heavy names that the screen filters out.
For an investor coming from a passive market-cap-weighted starting point, the halal screen produces a portfolio with roughly twice the healthcare exposure, roughly three times the technology exposure, and approximately one-fifth the financial-services exposure of the unfiltered US tape.
Headline finding 4: median halal stock is small, but the consensus cohort is large-cap
Median market cap by cohort:
| Cohort | Stock count | Median market cap | Mean market cap |
|---|
| Halal compliant (all) | 3,573 | $520M | $21.6B |
| Halal + Buffett-Fit score >= 60 | 296 | $17.4B | $179.2B |
| Halal + Buffett-Fit grade A | 8 | $46.9B | $117.1B |
| Halal + all-7-frameworks pass | 43 | $69.2B | $657.8B |
The halal cohort as a whole has a median market cap of $520 million. That is a small-cap-heavy distribution, because the AAOIFI screen disproportionately keeps debt-light, specialty-business smaller names while filtering out the larger-cap banks and insurers that anchor the broad market.
Layer the value-investing screens on top and the median market cap rises sharply. Halal stocks that pass Buffett-Fit at B-minus or better have a median market cap of $17.4 billion. Halal stocks that are grade-A on Buffett-Fit have a median market cap of $46.9 billion. Halal stocks that pass all seven value-investing frameworks have a median market cap of $69.2 billion.
The pattern is intuitive. Value-investing screens reward sustained ROIC, durable margins, and balance-sheet quality, which is correlated with reaching meaningful scale. Halal screening, by contrast, is mostly about industry classification and debt ratio, which a small specialty-software company or a niche industrial can satisfy as easily as a megacap. The intersection of "halal" and "passes value-investing screens" is therefore biased toward larger compounders, and the cross-framework consensus cohort is solidly mid-to-large cap.
The 43 names that are both halal and pass all 7 frameworks
This is the full halal-and-all-7-consensus list as of 26 May 2026, ordered by market cap. Cohort average score across all 7 frameworks shown in the rightmost column.
| Ticker | Company | Sector | Market cap | Avg score |
|---|
| NVDA | NVIDIA Corporation | Technology | $5.22T | 79.3 |
| GOOGL | Alphabet Inc. | Communication Services | $4.63T | 65.2 |
| GOOG | Alphabet Inc. | Communication Services | $4.59T | 65.2 |
| AAPL | Apple Inc. | Technology | $4.54T | 70.7 |
| TSM | Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing | Technology | $2.10T | 70.6 |
| AVGO | Broadcom Inc. | Technology | $1.96T | 78.2 |
| LLY | Eli Lilly and Company | Healthcare | $1.00T | 75.6 |
| V | Visa Inc. | Financial Services | $630B | 71.9 |
| ASML | ASML Holding N.V. | Technology | $629B | 74.9 |
| MA | Mastercard Incorporated | Financial Services | $441B | 78.6 |
| LRCX | Lam Research Corporation | Technology | $382B | 77.8 |
| AMAT | Applied Materials, Inc. | Technology | $343B | 70.0 |
| KLAC | KLA Corporation | Technology | $247B | 82.5 |
| ANET | Arista Networks, Inc. | Technology | $194B | 77.0 |
| APP | AppLovin Corporation | Technology | $162B | 80.5 |
| ISRG | Intuitive Surgical, Inc. | Healthcare | $155B | 69.3 |
| VRT | Vertiv Holdings Co | Industrials | $126B | 65.4 |
| TT | Trane Technologies plc |
Sector tilt of the 43-stock halal-and-all-7 cohort:
| Sector | Stocks | Share |
|---|
| Technology | 18 | 41.9% |
| Industrials | 9 | 20.9% |
| Healthcare | 6 | 14.0% |
| Financial Services | 4 | 9.3% |
| Communication Services | 2 | 4.7% |
| Consumer Cyclical | 2 | 4.7% |
| Energy | 1 | 2.3% |
| Consumer Defensive | 1 | 2.3% |
The halal-and-all-7 cohort is even more tech-and-industrials-heavy than the broader 48-stock consensus cohort, and Financial Services is now narrowly populated only by the four payment-network and exchange-and-data names that survive AAOIFI's interest-spread filter (V, MA, MSCI, SII).
Headline finding 5: the 8 halal stocks that score grade-A on Buffett-Fit
If you tighten the value-investing screen all the way to grade-A on Buffett-Fit alone (the most selective single-framework filter we publish), the halal-compliant survivors are eight names.
| Ticker | Company | Sector | Market cap | Buffett score |
|---|
| FICO | Fair Isaac Corporation | Technology | $29B | 85 |
| MA | Mastercard Incorporated | Financial Services | $441B | 84 |
| FTNT | Fortinet, Inc. | Technology | $98B | 83 |
| TPL | Texas Pacific Land Corporation | Energy | $28B | 81 |
| ADSK | Autodesk, Inc. | Technology | $51B | 80 |
| WINA | Winmark Corporation | Consumer Cyclical | $1B | 80 |
| KLAC | KLA Corporation | Technology | $247B | 80 |
| MSCI | MSCI Inc. | Financial Services | $43B | 80 |
Six of the eight are software or platform businesses with capital-light economics (FICO, MA, FTNT, ADSK, KLAC, MSCI). One is a unique royalty-and-land asset (TPL). One is a niche specialty-retail franchisor (WINA). The cohort is small enough to be memorable and broad enough to span four sectors.
Per-stock verdicts and full per-framework breakdowns for any of the 43 or the 8 are available through the public verdict endpoint, for example /api/public/verdict/MA or /api/public/verdict/FICO. Programmatic halal pages live at /halal/MA/, /halal/FICO/, and the full set.
What this means for halal investors
Three observations, framed as observations and not advice.
Observation 1: halal screening is closer to value-investing screening than most people assume. The 89.6 percent overlap at the all-7-frameworks-pass level is not a coincidence. Both screens reward low interest-bearing debt, both screens are biased against businesses whose primary income comes from interest spread or from secularly-restricted industries, and both screens prefer durable cash flows over reinvestment-heavy growth. A halal investor who builds a watchlist from the AAOIFI-compliant universe and then sorts by Buffett-Fit, Smith, or Greenblatt is doing something very close to what a non-religious quality-value investor is doing, with a few specific stocks added (PM, HLT, SEZL, NP, PSTL) or subtracted depending on which screen runs first.
Observation 2: halal does not narrow your investable universe as much as the reputation suggests. 46.9 percent of the data-complete universe is compliant. The median halal stock has 11.2 percent interest-bearing debt versus 63.3 percent for non-compliant. The constraint is real, but it is not "you only have ten stocks to choose from." It is "you have a 3,500-stock universe biased toward healthcare and tech, with no banks." That is workable for a long-term retail allocation strategy.
Observation 3: the cross-framework consensus narrows to a small, named list. 43 stocks pass all 7 value-investing frameworks at B-minus or better and are halal-compliant. 8 pass at grade-A on Buffett-Fit and are halal-compliant. Those are not buy lists, because valuation moves daily and a stock can cross the threshold in either direction in a month. They are starting points for further research. A halal investor with limited time and the desire to do disciplined, framework-aware fundamental research has a meaningfully shorter list to work with than a non-halal investor scanning the same screens.
This is not investment advice. The frameworks and the halal screen both measure documented criteria from published standards. Whether the criteria still produce excess returns or remain Shariah-compliant under any individual scholar's interpretation is a question only that scholar (or a licensed financial advisor) can answer. Sect-specific halal interpretation in particular is not something a single screen can fully capture.
How to reproduce this study
Everything in this post is reproducible from the public surface of invest-like.com.
- Per-stock halal verdict: /halal/[ticker]/ renders the halal classification, reasons, and the AAOIFI ratio for any covered ticker. The same fields are returned by the public verdict endpoint.
- Per-stock 7-framework verdict:
/api/public/verdict/[ticker] returns the full per-framework breakdown (score, grade, verdict, per-criterion pass/fail) in JSON. No authentication required.
- Cross-framework consensus endpoint:
/api/public/consensus returns the top stocks by consensus score across all 7 frameworks.
- Halal landing hub: /halal/ lists the full halal-compliant universe with sector and market-cap filters.
- Methodology hub: /methodology/ documents each value framework's criteria and scoring function. The halal-screening implementation is at /blog/halal-screening-methodology-deep-dive/.
- AAOIFI background: /blog/aaoifi-standard-21-explained-2026/ covers the standard itself in plain English.
- OpenAPI spec: /api/public/openapi.json covers the full public API surface.
- Bulk machine-readable index: /llms-full.txt contains a flat dump of the most important fields for LLM consumption.
If you replicate the methodology and find different numbers, please email zaid@invest-like.com with your methodology and we will publish a correction or a comparison post.
FAQ
Why combine AAOIFI Standard 21 with value-investing frameworks at all?
Because they answer different questions but produce surprisingly similar shortlists. AAOIFI asks "is this business and balance sheet compatible with Islamic finance?" The value-investing frameworks ask "is this business and balance sheet compatible with sustainable long-term compounding?" The two questions are not the same, but both reward low interest-bearing debt and avoidance of certain industries that have weak long-run fundamentals (heavy gambling, tobacco, lending spread). The 89.6 percent overlap at the all-7-pass level reflects that structural commonality.
Why is the apples-to-apples halal cohort only 3,477 of 3,573?
The 7 value-investing frameworks have different data requirements. Munger, Smith, and Fisher require longer fundamentals histories. 96 of the 3,573 halal-compliant stocks have not been fully scored on all 7 yet (mostly recent IPOs and smaller ADRs with sparse FMP coverage). Those 96 are excluded from the cross-framework intersection counts but included in the overall halal cohort statistics.
Are these numbers going to change?
Yes. As fundamentals refresh quarterly and as the halal classification reruns against new financial statements, individual stocks will cross thresholds in both directions. The exact 43 is a snapshot as of 26 May 2026. The structural shape of the overlap (high 80s percent overlap at the all-7-pass level, dramatic sector reweighting away from financial services, healthcare-and-tech tilt) is stable across the snapshots we have observed since production launch.
How is "halal" defined here?
"Halal" in this post means halal_status = 'compliant' in our database, which is our implementation of AAOIFI Standard 21 on activity classification (no primary business in alcohol, tobacco, conventional finance, gambling, pork, adult entertainment, weapons-out-of-defensive-use) plus the financial-ratio screen (interest-bearing debt and interest-bearing-securities tests, roughly 33 percent of assets thresholds). Different scholarly bodies (DJIM, S&P Shariah, MSCI Islamic, FTSE Yasaar, AAOIFI itself) use slightly different thresholds and tolerances. The methodology deep dive at /blog/halal-screening-methodology-deep-dive/ documents the specific implementation. Sect-specific interpretation is the responsibility of the individual investor and their scholar.
Why does the halal cohort have a lower median ROIC than the non-compliant cohort?
This is one of the counter-intuitive results in the data. Median 5-year average ROIC for halal stocks is 0.6 percent. Median for non-compliant stocks is 2.7 percent. The reason is composition: the non-compliant cohort is anchored by large profitable banks and insurers, which generate high accounting ROIC by leveraging cheap deposits. Halal screening filters those out by construction. The remaining halal universe skews smaller, with more pre-profit healthcare and tech, which drags the median ROIC down. The intersection of halal and value-investing frameworks (especially Buffett-Fit and Smith) corrects for this by re-selecting for ROIC inside the halal cohort; the 43-stock and 8-stock cohorts have vastly higher ROIC than the halal median.
Can I cite these numbers?
Yes. Cite as invest-like.com 2026, "We screened 12,500 US stocks against both AAOIFI Standard 21 (halal) AND the 7-framework value-investing consensus", snapshot 26 May 2026. Link target is this page. The dataset is publicly accessible through the API endpoints listed above, and the licence terms are public at /press/. If you want a copy of the underlying snapshot CSV for academic use, email zaid@invest-like.com.
Educational disclaimer
This post is an empirical study of how AAOIFI Standard 21 and seven documented value-investing frameworks overlap on the current US-listed equity universe. Nothing in this post is a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and nothing in this post should be read as a Shariah-governance ruling. The halal classification documented here is our implementation of a single published standard. Sect-specific interpretation, scholar-specific guidance, secondary-revenue tolerance thresholds, and purification calculations are the responsibility of the individual investor and their scholar. Readers should consult a licensed financial advisor for personalised investment advice and a qualified Islamic finance scholar for personalised Shariah governance.
Data snapshot: 26 May 2026. Methodology hub: /methodology/. Halal landing hub: /halal/. Source data: /llms-full.txt. Public API: /api/public/openapi.json.