Two weeks ago I pulled Amazon's 10-Q and ran the debt screen — it passed. Last week, Boeing — passed the ratio, excluded anyway for what it makes. This week: a stock that actually fails the debt test itself, on the filed numbers, by a margin wide enough that the usual argument about which denominator to use doesn't even matter. The filing. Ford Motor Company's 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, filed with the SEC. Public, free, on EDGAR. Link at the bottom. The numbers, straight from the consolidated balance sheet (in millions): Total assets: $285,531 Short-term debt — Company excluding Ford Credit: $4,381 Long-term debt — Company excluding Ford Credit: $19,238 Short-term debt — Ford Credit: $46,956 Long-term debt — Ford Credit: $90,392 Total debt (all four lines): $160,967 Market cap today (Sept 24, 2026): ~$51.02B Test 1a — Debt / total assets (the SP Funds prospectus version I used for Amazon). $160,967M / $285,531M = 56.4%. The line is 33.33%. This isn't close, and it isn't a "depends which fund's methodology" call. It fails by about 23 points. Test 1b — Debt / market cap (the version most "one number" content actually uses). $160,967M / $51,020M = ~315%. Same verdict, much wider margin. I wrote earlier about how the choice of denominator changes the answer for some stocks. Ford isn't one of those cases. It fails on both, so the denominator argument doesn't rescue it here. Why the number is this big. Look at where the debt actually sits. Ford the automaker, on its own, carries $23.6B of short- and long-term debt. Ford Credit — the financing arm that funds the loans and leases customers use to buy or lease a Ford — carries $137.3B on the same consolidated balance sheet. That's 85% of the total. Ford Credit's business is lending money at interest and funding that lending by issuing debt. It shows up in Ford's numbers because Ford Credit is a consolidated subsidiary, not a side entity. Where I have to stop. Some screening methodologies may treat a company's captive finance subsidiary differently from its core operating debt. I don't have the AAOIFI standard or a specific index provider's methodology document in hand this session to tell you whether that adjustment exists, or what it would do to this number if it did. What I'm showing you is the consolidated balance sheet as filed. Whether a particular halal fund's published methodology nets out captive-finance debt before applying its 33% line is a real question I'm not answering here. That stays a hole, not a verdict.

Amazon passed the three balance-sheet tests two weeks ago. Boeing passed them last week and got excluded anyway, for what it makes, not what it owes. Both posts left one gap: neither showed what an actual fail looks like. This week does. The filing. Carnival Corporation & plc's 10-Q for the quarter ended May 31, 2026, filed with the SEC. Public, free, on EDGAR. Link at the bottom. The method. Same three balance-sheet tests from the SP Funds prospectus I've used the last two weeks. The numbers, straight from the balance sheet (in millions): Total assets: $52,228 Current portion of long-term debt: $1,471 Long-term debt: $23,418 Total debt: $24,889 Cash and cash equivalents: $2,243 Trade and other receivables, net: $633 (No separate short-term investments line on this balance sheet.) Test 1 — Debt / total assets. $24,889M / $52,228M = 47.7%. Fails the 33.33% line — not a rounding-error miss, fourteen and a half points over. If you use market cap instead of total assets (Carnival's market cap today, September 24, 2026, is $29.67B): $24,889M / $29,670M = 83.9%. Fails harder on that denominator. Either way this one is out on debt alone, before you even check the other two tests. Test 2 — Cash and interest-bearing items / total assets. $2,243M / $52,228M = 4.3%. Passes. Test 3 — Accounts receivable and cash / total assets. ($633M + $2,243M) / $52,228M = 5.5%. Passes. One test failing is enough. A screen doesn't average your three results — it fails you the moment you break any single line. Carnival passes two out of three and is still out, the same way a fund wouldn't touch a stock that failed only the income test and passed everything else. What I'm not telling you. Cruise ships run onboard casinos and sell alcohol — a plausible business-activity question, the same shape as Boeing's defense segment. I have not pulled a screening methodology source that addresses cruise lines specifically this session, so I'm not asserting an exclusion on that basis. Named as a hole, not a verdict. On the numbers alone, the debt test already ends this one.

Most "is it halal" content gives you a verdict with no math behind it. Last week I pulled Amazon's 10-Q and ran the three balance-sheet tests myself. This week: Boeing. Same method, different company — and a different lesson. The filing. Boeing's 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, filed with the SEC. Public, free, on EDGAR. Link at the bottom. The numbers, straight from the balance sheet (in millions): Total assets: $165,870 Cash and cash equivalents: $7,239 Short-term and other investments: $12,783 Accounts receivable, net: $3,515 Total debt (short-term + long-term): $4,565 + $41,335 = $45,900 Shares outstanding: 790,370,020. Stock price today: $201.86. Market cap: ~$159.5B. Test 1 — Debt / market cap. $45,900M / $159,540M = 28.8%. Passes the 33.33% line. Test 2 — Cash and interest-bearing items / market cap. ($7,239 + $12,783) / $159,540 = 12.5%. Passes. Test 3 — Accounts receivable and cash / total assets. ($3,515 + $7,239) / $165,870 = 6.5%. Passes. Three for three. On the "one number" version of the test — the one that says debt under a third of market cap means a stock is halal — Boeing looks clean. But every screening service that publishes a verdict on Boeing calls it not Shariah-compliant. Not "borderline." Not "check the fourth test." Excluded. Why, if the ratios pass? Because the ratio tests are the second filter, not the first. Before any of that arithmetic, there's a business-activity screen: what does the company actually do? Boeing has three segments. Two are commercial aviation and services. One is Defense, Space & Security — "the research, development, production and modification of manned and unmanned military aircraft and weapons systems," in Boeing's own words. That segment brought in $15,082M of Boeing's $46,777M in revenue for the first half of 2026. That's 32% — a real business line, not a footnote. Weapons manufacturing sits on every major exclusion list — alongside alcohol, gambling, conventional interest-based banking, tobacco, pork. A company doesn't get graded on its balance sheet for that; it gets screened out by what it makes. The debt ratio never gets asked.

Most "is it halal" content online just asserts a verdict — "Apple passes, Amazon fails" — with no filing behind it. So today, instead of another explainer, I pulled Amazon's real quarterly report and did the test myself. You can do the same for any stock in about ten minutes. The filing. Amazon's 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, filed with the SEC on July 31, 2026. Public, free, on EDGAR. Link at the bottom. The method. I'm using the same three balance-sheet tests SP Funds states in its prospectus (SPUS's own fund): - Debt under 33.33% of total assets - Cash and interest-bearing items under 33.33% of total assets - Accounts receivable and cash under 50% of total assets - Plus a fourth test — interest and non-compliant income under 5% of revenue — which I'll come back to, because it's the one this post can't finish. The numbers, straight from the balance sheet (in millions): Total assets: $1,095,689 Long-term debt: $128,894 Short-term debt: $3,330 Cash and cash equivalents: $78,213 Marketable securities: $44,775 Accounts receivable, net: $88,092 Test 1 — Debt / total assets. ($128,894 + $3,330) / $1,095,689 = 12.1%. Passes the 33.33% line comfortably. (If you're used to seeing debt divided by market cap instead — Amazon's market cap is roughly $2.77 trillion today, so that version comes out to 4.8%. Same pass, different denominator. I covered why the denominator matters in an earlier post; it doesn't change the verdict here either way.) Test 2 — Cash and interest-bearing items / total assets. ($78,213 + $44,775) / $1,095,689 = 11.2%. Passes. Test 3 — Accounts receivable and cash / total assets. ($88,092 + $78,213) / $1,095,689 = 15.2%. Passes. Test 4 — the one I can't give you. The fourth AAOIFI-style test is interest income plus any non-compliant business income, divided by total revenue, under 5%. That number lives in the income statement and the segment notes, not the balance sheet, and for a company like Amazon it isn't a clean single line — Amazon runs a lending program for third-party sellers that generates interest income, on top of whatever else needs separating out. I did not pull that filing detail this session, so I'm not giving you a verdict. This is exactly why "one number tells you" is a myth: the balance-sheet tests are the easy 80%. The income test is the part that actually requires reading the filing closely, and it's the part most shortcuts skip.