Editorial independence & how we make money

The short version

fx-brokers is an affiliate-funded broker comparison site. When you open an account with a broker via one of our links, the broker pays us a commission. Some brokers also pay for sponsored placements, which are labelled “Sponsored”. We don't sell user data and we don't charge for access to our content.

We list and recommend only brokers and prop firms we have a commercial agreement with. A broker without an agreement does not appear in our rankings, tables, comparisons or recommendations. Reference pages about such brokers may stay online, but we do not point readers to them.

The order of our lists combines editorial quality (40%) with commercial performance: earnings per click (30%), conversion rate (20%) and partner reply speed (10%). Commercial terms therefore affect the order in which listed brokers appear.

What we'll never do

• Sell a broker's score. Each broker's score comes from the methodology at /methodology and is the same whatever the commercial terms.
• Remove a negative review, spread widening, or fee increase because a broker asked us to. Broker partnerships are not contingent on editorial silence.
• Accept promotional copy verbatim. Every broker page is written by our editorial team from broker disclosures and regulator registers, then reviewed by the editor.
• Guarantee trading outcomes, or describe CFD trading as “easy”, “simple”, or “risk-free”. 74-89% of retail CFD accounts lose money; we say so next to every outbound affiliate CTA.
• Treat AI-generated content as finished. Automation handles triage, scheduling, and data entry; every page published carries a human editor's byline.

What we do on purpose

• Delist brokers that fail basic compliance. When a broker's regulated entity cannot serve EU users, or when their partnership programme becomes unusable, they come off the site. Historical delistings are documented in our partner ops runbook.
• Publish per-broker compliance reports at /compliance/[broker-slug]. Each report captures the exact risk wording and disclosures we render for that broker, plus the change history. Partnerships teams can audit us in one URL.
• Run a compliance linter on every build. The linter checks that we never describe trading as “easy” or “simple”, that we never frame a non-spread-only broker as spread-only, and that broker-specific risk warnings match the wording each partnership team has approved.
• Show broker-specific risk warnings, not generic ones. Plus500's warning differs from Pepperstone's and Tickmill's. We track each wording and render the correct one beside every outbound CTA.

Revenue model breakdown

• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). Flat fee paid once a user opens and funds an account. The fee varies by broker and country. This is our default structure for CySEC / BaFin / FCA entities.
• Revenue share / introducing broker (IB). Percentage of the broker's net revenue on trades placed by referred users. Not used for EU retail traffic — rev-share for EU clients requires MiFID II licensing that we do not hold. We only take rev-share from a broker's offshore entity when the user is outside the EU/EEA/UK perimeter.
• No display advertising runs on broker review pages today. An AdSense unit may appear on editorial content (guides, news) once Google approves our site.
• Sponsored placements are labelled. A paid position is marked “Sponsored” wherever it appears. The “Editor's Pick” badge is assigned by score among the brokers we list.

Our editorial structure

Coverage is organised by three editorial desks rather than named individuals — Markets Desk (broker analysis and trading-cost coverage), Platforms Desk (platform and execution-quality benchmarking) and Regulation Desk (EU regulatory tracking and investor protection). Each desk is an editorial persona used to separate beat coverage from byline noise; research is conducted by qualified contributors under disclosed editorial standards. Final review for every published broker review rests with the editor (Alex Marchetti — a pseudonym disclosed at /about/editorial-desks, used to protect against a separate professional conflict of interest). Every broker review is bylined — if a page lacks a byline, it is an editorial oversight and we treat it as a bug.

Complaints and corrections

If you believe any statement on this site is inaccurate, email info@fx-brokers.eu with the URL and the correction. Corrections are posted publicly with a dated note at the bottom of the affected page. We aim for same-business-day turnaround on factual corrections involving regulator numbers, fees, or trading conditions.