Transparency

Our Methodology

How we research, compare, and score every forex broker on our platform.

Maintained by the FX-Brokers Editorial team, led by Alex Marchetti.

Our independence pledge

No broker can pay to change its ranking or score on FX-Brokers.info. Commercial and affiliate relationships never affect our assessment.

Every broker is scored against the same published criteria set out below. Affiliate partners receive no advantage: they cannot buy a higher score, a better ranking, or more favourable wording, and they never see or approve a review before it is published. Where the evidence warrants it, we score affiliate partners below brokers we earn nothing from. If a broker ever offered payment to alter a score, the answer is no, and this pledge is the reason we can be trusted on the rest of this page.

How We Score Brokers

Every broker on FX-Brokers.info is evaluated across 8 distinct categories, each weighted according to its importance for EU retail traders. The overall score is a weighted average of these category scores, each rated on a scale from 1.0 to 10.0.

We prioritize fees and regulation equally (20% each) because for EU traders, both low-cost trading and strong regulatory protection are essential. Execution and platform quality follow at 15% each, reflecting their direct impact on trading outcomes.

Scoring Categories & Weights

Fees & Spreads

20%

We compare trading costs from each broker's published pricing: raw and standard spreads, commissions, swap rates, deposit/withdrawal fees, inactivity fees, and currency conversion charges.

Regulation & Safety

20%

We evaluate the regulatory licenses held, the strength of each regulator, client fund segregation practices, investor compensation scheme coverage, company financial stability, and years of operational history.

Execution Quality

15%

We compare each broker's execution model (ECN, STP or market maker), the execution statistics it publishes where it discloses them, and its stated policies on slippage, requotes and order handling.

Trading Platforms

15%

We assess the range and quality of trading platforms offered, including charting tools, order types, mobile experience, API access, and third-party integrations such as MetaTrader, cTrader, and TradingView.

Customer Support

10%

We compare the support channels each broker publishes (live chat, email, phone), its stated support hours, and the languages it offers to European traders.

Education & Research

We evaluate the depth and quality of educational resources, research tools, market analysis, webinars, and learning pathways available to traders at different experience levels.

Instruments & Markets

We count and categorize the total number of tradable instruments across forex pairs, indices, commodities, stocks, ETFs, bonds, and cryptocurrencies, assessing the breadth of market access offered.

EU Compliance

We check each broker's published terms for ESMA compliance, including proper leverage limits, negative balance protection implementation, risk warning display, bonus restrictions, and the clarity of EU-specific disclosures.

Our Research Process

Our reviews are built from primary sources: each broker's published pricing, licences, platforms and terms, and the public registers of its regulators. We do not open live accounts or place trades, and no figure on this site is presented as our own measurement. Here is what we do for every broker:

Account terms: We review the broker's published account types, minimum deposits, KYC requirements, and onboarding steps for EU/UK clients.
Deposits and withdrawals: We compare the funding methods, fees, and processing times each broker publishes for EU/UK clients.
Pricing and execution: We compare published spreads, commissions, swap rates, and execution models across each broker's account types.
Platform comparison: We compare the platforms each broker offers, including desktop, web, and mobile versions, and the features it documents for each.
Support: We compare the support channels, hours, and languages each broker publishes.
Regulatory verification: We check every claimed licence against the relevant regulator's public register and confirm ESMA compliance by reviewing the broker's terms and conditions.

Update Schedule

Broker reviews are not a one-time effort. Markets, fees, and platforms change constantly. Our update schedule ensures information stays current:

Quarterly reviews: We re-check published spreads, fees, and account terms every quarter to capture structural changes.
Event-driven updates: When a broker changes its fee structure, adds a new platform, changes its regulatory status, or undergoes any material change, we update the review within one week.
Annual deep dives: Once per year, we conduct a full re-evaluation of every broker, re-checking every source from scratch.

Every review page shows the date of its last update so you know how current the information is.

Figures We Publish But Do Not Measure

Everything above describes how we compare brokers' published data and score it. Some of the numbers on this site are figures we cannot check at all, and we separate them deliberately.

The clearest case is the CFD loss rate: the percentage of a broker's retail accounts that lose money. Every broker marketing CFDs to retail clients in the EU/EEA or the UK must publish this figure, calculated over its own client book, per legal entity. We cannot observe a broker's client book and we cannot verify these percentages independently. So we do not treat them as measurements: we reproduce each broker's own published disclosure, attribute it to the entity and regulator it applies to, and date it to the notice that issued it.

See every figure, sourced and dated: CFD loss rates by broker

One row per legal entity, each showing the broker's published percentage, its regulator and licence number, and the dated source it came from. These figures do not feed our editorial scores and are not comparable between brokers — each is calculated on a different client book over a different period.

Editorial Independence

FX-Brokers.info is editorially independent. While we earn revenue through affiliate partnerships with some of the brokers we review (see our About page for details on our business model), affiliate relationships have absolutely no influence on our scores, rankings, or recommendations.

Brokers cannot pay for higher scores. All reviews follow the same methodology regardless of whether we have a commercial relationship with the broker. We regularly feature brokers with whom we have no affiliate arrangement if their product quality warrants it, and we have given low scores to affiliate partners when the data justified it.

Our editorial team operates independently from the commercial team. No review or score can be changed as a result of a commercial discussion.

Sourcing and Corrections

Every figure behind these scores traces to the broker's own published disclosures or to the register of the regulator concerned — never to a broker's marketing copy. When we get a figure wrong, we correct the page and log the correction publicly with the date it shipped and what we had published.

The full sourcing policy and the complete, dated corrections log are on our fact-check and corrections page. If you believe a figure on this site is wrong, that page tells you how to report it.

Who Writes and Reviews This

Written and maintained by the FX-Brokers Editorial team, led by Alex Marchetti. Alex Marchetti is the editorial lead for FX-Brokers.info and the custodian of this methodology.

The team behind this methodology compares brokers from primary sources: published pricing and account terms, platform documentation, regulators' public registers, and the regulatory disclosures that sit behind each licence. That source-first approach shapes every category and weight on this page.

Alex Marchetti is a pen name for the FX-Brokers Editorial team. We publish under a consistent editorial identity so that responsibility for our scores is clear and accountable, while the individuals behind the research remain private.