Both standards screen the same issuers from the same filings. They reach a different verdict on 2,935 of the 20,361 companies each of them can decide.
| Usmani | MSCI Islamic | |
|---|---|---|
| Debt ceiling | 33.0% | 33.33% |
| Measured against | total assets | total assets |
| Issuers passing | 7,687 | 5,817 |
| Could not establish | 10,009 | 9,939 |
Both measure against total assets, so the difference is the ceiling alone: 33.0% against 33.33%. Every company they split on sits in that narrow band.
A company whose market capitalisation halves has a debt ratio that doubles under a market-cap standard and does not move at all under an asset-based one — nothing about the business changed, but the verdict did. How often each lever is the one that splits a pair is measured across every pair here.
Real issuers from HTR's corpus. Open any of them for the ratio each verdict rests on — which is the thing that makes a disagreement checkable rather than merely stated.
ADMA · EXLS · TEM · AGYS · YZOFF · ZJK · PFAI · CGC · WFCF · G · MU · GWRE
ADDYY · FPLSF · ADDDF · CRH · BDX · MTZ · KC · DTM · REYN · ROL · 5SR.SI · CLIK
HTR does not have a view on which of these two standards you should follow. They are both published, both applied by real index providers, and both defensible — they simply define the question differently. Which definition applies to you is a matter for your own scholarship.
What HTR can do is compute both honestly, show you where they part company, and never hide the split behind a single blended score.