How We Review Brokers

Each broker is scored across eight categories: regulation, withdrawals, payouts, platform quality, asset range, customer support, education, and pricing transparency. Each category is weighted by how much it materially affects a trader's outcome.

Regulation and withdrawals together carry the largest weight — a broker with great payouts that delays withdrawals is not actually offering great payouts.

Every review starts with a funded live account on the broker's standard tier — we don't accept VIP or promotional accounts that would distort the experience.

We then run a fixed test plan: 20 trades across three asset classes, two deposit methods, one withdrawal, two support tickets (one easy, one deliberately tricky), and a mobile-app walkthrough on both iOS and Android.

Results are logged in a shared sheet with timestamps and screenshots so any team member can audit them later.

Brokers cannot pay to be added, removed or re-ranked. Our editorial ratings are firewalled from any commercial relationships.

When we change a rating, the previous score and the reason for the change are preserved in the article's correction log.

Reviews are re-tested at least once a quarter, and any broker that materially changes its payout structure, regulation status or platform is re-tested within two weeks.