Which businesses actually get financed

Ranked on FUNDED ACQUISITION VOLUME, not on growth. /screen ranks industries on net establishment formation, which answers whether a field is growing — the right question for someone deciding what to start. A buyer is asking whether a lender will fund this, at what price, and how often it goes wrong. Source: SBA 7(a) FOIA loan book, acquisitions only, separated from start-up lending by the SBA's own business-age field.

MARGIN READS "not published" FOR MOST SERVICE INDUSTRIES, and that is a coverage fact rather than a low margin. The Economic Census collects a cost structure for construction, manufacturing and wholesale and collects none for retail, transport, professional services, food service or personal services. Filtering on a minimum margin therefore removes every industry Census does not measure — which is a real narrowing and worth knowing you have done.

Take this shortlist away → One self-contained file with the criteria stated above the result, a content hash anyone can check at /verify, and what it does not tell you. A shortlist without its criteria is a list of industries with no account of why those — and the criteria being inside the hash is how a recipient can tell they were chosen before the result rather than after it.

166 industries, three independent windows. Industries with no licence gate shrank in every one; every gated bucket beat them. The peak is a MARGINAL gate, not a high one — which contradicts what our own rubric asserts, and the contradiction is recorded next to the rubric rather than quietly resolved.