Shari’ah-compliant Stock Screening: A Financial Perspective

Stock markets have always provided countries with a practical and flexible way to finance their economies. Hence, Islamic finance has embraced the stock market since the early 90s adopting the same framework as an ethical investment. Accordingly, Islamic investors in emerging countries shall have a range of choices when constructing a financial portfolio. However, existing screening methodologies lack flexibility as they are mainly based on rigid ratios and irrelevant thresholds. Consequently, these methodologies lead to an inefficient stock index as they completely ignore the features of each stock market along with the specificities of each industry. Thus, our study will try to propose a new screening methodology based on the optimal financial structure of each industry. The main objective of our study is to propose a methodology that will overcome different loopholes addressed in the literature. The present paper is an explanatory study which needs an empirical confirmation of the proposed methodology in order to measure its performance and efficiency against existing shari’ah-compliant indices. Hence, the main preliminary finding of our research is to enrich the academic debate on shari’ah-compliant screening methodologies through appealing to conventional corporate finance framework to enhance current methodologies.