Advertising and Disclosure

BrokerWatcher earns affiliate commission from some of the brokers it rates, and is paid by some firms to publish commissioned pages about them. This page states which arrangements exist, what the money can and cannot influence, and how to check that for yourself rather than take our word for it.

How this site makes money

Referral commission. Where a broker runs an affiliate programme and we hold an account in it, the link on that broker’s review is a tracked link, and the site is paid if you open an account through it. You pay nothing extra; the commission comes out of the broker’s marketing budget, not your deposit or your spread.

We carry no display advertising, sell no sponsored reviews, and accept no payment for coverage, placement or a verdict.

The rule that makes this workable

An affiliate arrangement is only possible with a broker we have already rated Trusted or Neutral. It is not possible with a broker rated High Risk or Scam, and those reviews carry no outbound link of any kind. The domain is printed in full so you can identify the right firm, but a page telling you not to deposit is not also going to be the shortest route to the deposit form.

This is the whole reason the two-way split exists. The site earns nothing from the brokers it criticises, which is where the pressure to soften a review would come from if the incentive ran the other way.

What the commission cannot do

• It cannot set a score. The six pillar scores come from the evidence cited under each one, on the same published formula applied to every broker on the site. The verdict is arithmetic on those six numbers. There is no editorial override and no commercial override.
• It cannot buy a ranking position. Order in any comparison table follows the score. There is no paid tier, no featured slot, no bidding.
• It cannot remove a finding. Reviews of brokers we earn from carry their problems in full: fee traps, open regulatory proceedings, entity structures that put a client outside the licence in the footer. If those findings had been left out, the arrangement would have bought something.
• It cannot survive a downgrade. If a broker we earn from drops to High Risk on new evidence, the link comes off the page the same day the verdict changes, and the change is logged in that review’s changelog.

How to check us

Read the negative findings in a review that carries a commission link. Every review labels its affiliate relationship at the top of the page, before the findings, not in a footnote underneath them. Then compare the pillar scores against the evidence cited beside each one. If a score looks generous next to what the review itself documents, that is the discrepancy to write to us about, and we will either justify it in public or change it in public.

Outbound links to a broker we earn from carry rel="nofollow sponsored". Links to a broker we do not earn from carry rel="nofollow". You can read either in the page source.

Links to regulator registers, corporate filings and primary documents are never affiliate links, and never paid. They are there so you can repeat our checks at the source.

Conflicts beyond affiliate commission

Any other commercial relationship with a firm mentioned on this site is disclosed on that firm’s page in the same way. Where a relationship exists that we judge cannot be neutralised by disclosure alone, we do not publish a rating on that firm at all. Withholding a review is a real cost to a site like this, and it is a smaller cost than publishing one nobody should believe.

Brokers cannot buy a verdict

We are approached by brokers who want a negative review changed or removed, and by brokers offering a commercial arrangement in exchange for one. The answer is the same to both. A verdict moves when the evidence behind it moves, and the way to move it is to fix what the review documents: get a real licence, name your owners, drop the turnover trap, pay withdrawals on time. Send proof of any of those and the rating is recalculated in public, with the reason logged.

Company Profile pages, and what they are not

Some pages on this site are commissioned. A broker pays us to write a page describing what it
offers, and that page is labelled Company Profile in the same place every other
page carries its verdict. That label tells you the page is not a rating.

It does not tell you the page was paid for, so the page itself does. A notice sits at the top of
every commissioned page, above any material about the firm, stating that the page was commissioned
and naming the company that paid for it. If you are reading a page on this site about a broker and
you cannot see either a verdict or that notice, tell us, because one of them should always be
there.

A sponsored page records what a broker publishes about itself: account types, spreads and
commissions, platforms, instrument counts, deposit and withdrawal methods, minimums and leverage,
checked against the material the firm itself publishes on the date shown. That is the whole of it.

It is not a rating. There is no score on a sponsored page, no verdict, and no recommendation,
and nothing on one should be read as advice to open an account or to trade. It also carries no
review markup in its code, so a search engine is told exactly what you are told: this is a
description, not an assessment.

Four things are refused outright, and they are refused by the software rather than by our good
intentions:

• A sponsored page cannot carry pillar scores. Scores produce a verdict, and a commissioned page
  does not get one.
• A sponsored page cannot be published without naming the firm that commissioned it.
• A sponsored page cannot contain a recommendation. Wording such as we recommend, your funds are
  safe, or open an account today is rejected when the page is imported and the page does not go
  live.
• A sponsored page cannot hold a ranked position on any comparison page here. Those positions are
  reserved for brokers our own method rates at Neutral or above.

None of this changes the independent reviews. A firm can pay for a sponsored page and still
carry a scored review on this site that rates it High Risk, and where that happens both pages stay
up and neither is edited to suit the other. The score comes from the evidence and it is not for
sale at any price.

Right of reply

Every broker we rate can send a response to their review. We publish it unedited and clearly attributed, at no cost, regardless of the verdict and regardless of whether any commercial relationship exists.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think we have failed to disclose something, tell us through the contact page.