Why trust us

Start from the opposite position: do not trust a website about money simply because it sounds careful. Confidence is the cheapest thing on the internet to manufacture, and a page that tells you to rely on it is doing exactly what the platforms we write about do.

What follows is the material you would need to decide for yourself, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.

How this site makes money

Sites in this category are usually funded by referral arrangements, and it would be dishonest to imply that ours sits outside that economy. Where a commercial relationship exists, it pays for a reader arriving at a partner, and it does not pay for a verdict.

Which is why the verdicts look the way they do. Most dispatches on this site end in unverified, which is not a word that sells anything. If our verdicts tracked our revenue you would expect a very different set of conclusions, and you can test that claim against the dispatches index in about a minute.

Two rules hold regardless of any arrangement. No platform can buy a better verdict, a higher position, the removal of an unfavourable line, or a delay in publication. And no platform sees a dispatch before a reader does.

What our checks cannot tell you

We have not deposited money with any platform on this site, so we cannot describe its withdrawal process from experience. We are not auditors and we have seen nobody's accounts. We read public registers, which are excellent at showing what is recorded and silent about everything else.

A register search also has a time stamp. We can say what a database returned on the day we searched it. We cannot say what it returned last month or what it will return next week, which is why every verdict on this site is printed with the date it was checked.

And our coverage is partial. There are public registers we cannot search well, languages we read poorly, and jurisdictions that publish very little. When a check was not possible, the dispatch says that rather than quietly narrowing the claim.

What would make us wrong

We could miss an entry that exists. We could read a promotional page that has since been rewritten. We could mistake two similarly named entities for each other, which is the single most likely error in this kind of work and the reason we insist on exact name matches.

If any of that happens, the remedy is the same: send evidence to [email protected] and the file changes, with the change dated on the page. We have no reputational stake in a verdict being right. We have a stake in the file being accurate today.

How to check us

Every dispatch names the searches it ran. Run them. If a dispatch says a supervisory database returned nothing under a name, that database is public and free, and you can confirm the result in the time it takes to make coffee.

Ask three questions of us and of every other site that reviews trading platforms. Does it name the operating company, or only the brand. Does it publish a licence number it claims to have verified, and can you find that number yourself. Does it explain how it is paid. A site that answers none of the three is describing a landing page, not a business.

The part that does not depend on us

Whatever you conclude about this desk, one thing stands on its own. If a platform will not tell you which legal entity you are contracting with, which regulator supervises it and where your money would be held, then the protections available to you are minimal, no matter how the service behaves in practice.

You do not need to trust us to act on that. You need to ask the three questions and see whether answers arrive.