Editorial Policy

This page documents the standards behind ForxZen's content. It applies to every page on the site, in every language.

How content is researched and written

Content is produced by ForxZen's editorial desks and drafted with the assistance of AI tools. We work from primary sources — broker terms, regulator registers, and official regulatory publications from bodies like the FCA, CySEC and ASIC.

We do not trade with the brokers we cover. We do not open live or funded accounts, place trades, or trial withdrawals, and nothing on this site should be read as a report of first-hand trading. Our assessments are desk research: what a broker publishes, what the regulator's own register shows, and what its terms actually say.

What we record about a broker, and what we refuse to

Every broker profile fills the same eleven fields, in the same order, so two brokers can be read against each other rather than against each one's own marketing:

1. Regulator and entity — the licence number as printed on that regulator's own public register, the exact contracting company it belongs to, the jurisdiction, the register we searched, and the date we searched it. Every one of those is on the page, and the register link is there so you can repeat the lookup rather than take our word for it.
2. Minimum deposit.
3. EUR/USD pricing, with its basis — whether a figure is a "from" spread, a typical spread, a measured average or a contractually fixed one.
4. Commission basis — per lot per side, per lot round turn, or none because the cost is in the spread.
5. Retail leverage, per entity.
6. Platforms.
7. Account types.
8. Islamic / swap-free availability.
9. Copy trading.
10. Payment methods.
11. Client eligibility — who the broker publishes as accepted and excluded.

A field we have not confirmed says "Not confirmed". It is not left blank, not quietly dropped from the table, and never filled in from another entity of the same brand because the value seemed likely. An unconfirmed field is a fact about our research, and hiding it would make a thin profile look like a complete one. Each profile also shows how many of the eleven fields it actually confirmed.

Three of those rules exist because getting them wrong is expensive for the reader, not for us:

• A regulator's name is not a licence. "FCA-regulated" with no number, no entity and no register behind it is a claim you can disprove in one lookup — and if one claim on a page fails that test, none of the others are worth anything. We have deleted our own broker profiles over exactly this.
• A "from" spread is not an average. It is the best case a broker advertises. We record which kind of figure it is, every time, because they are different claims about the same digits.
• Leverage belongs to an entity, not a brand. The same logo can serve one reader through an EU entity at 1:30 and another offshore at 1:500, with different money-protection rules. A leverage number with no entity beside it describes a company that does not exist.

The same eleven fields drive our head-to-head comparisons, so a comparison can never quietly use a different definition of "spread" for one broker than for the other.

Broker review methodology

Every broker on our leaderboard is scored 0–100 by a fixed formula, applied identically to every brand. The score is computed from the inputs below — it is not assigned by an editor, and every input is something you can verify yourself:

• Regulation — up to 45 points. Licence tier carries the most weight (Tier-1 regulators such as the FCA or ASIC score highest; a lighter-touch licence scores in the middle; offshore or unverified registrations score zero), with a small capped credit for each additional regulator. Verifiable in the regulator's own public register.
• Typical published spread — up to 25 points. A tighter published EUR/USD spread scores higher. Verifiable on the broker's own pricing page.
• Minimum deposit — up to 15 points. A lower published minimum makes an account more reachable. Verifiable in the broker's account terms.
• Platform choice — up to 8 points. How many trading platforms the broker publishes support for. This measures choice, not quality — judging a platform's quality would mean using it.
• Track record — up to 7 points. Years trading, from the founding year. A matter of company record.

An unregulated broker earns nothing for regulation no matter how many bodies it lists, and a missing input scores zero rather than being estimated.

What the score deliberately leaves out. Real execution quality, actual slippage, withdrawal speed in practice and support responsiveness are not scored. They can only be known by trading with a broker, and we do not — so scoring them would imply experience we do not have. The score answers "what does this broker's published, checkable record look like", not "what is it like to trade here".

The score is never influenced by commercial terms. A broker cannot be scored at all until its eleven fields are filled from checkable sources, so the score is a summary of verified inputs rather than a number an editor felt was about right.

We are currently publishing no broker profiles. The set that used to sit here was withdrawn: those firms carried regulator names as licensing claims without the licence numbers and registers that would let anyone check them, which is the one thing this page says we do not do. The comparison surfaces stay closed until profiles exist that satisfy the field contract above — an empty broker section is a smaller failure than a confident one nobody verified.

Editorial independence

ForxZen earns affiliate commission when readers sign up with brokers we link to (see Affiliate Disclosure). Commercial relationships never influence a score, ranking or verdict. A broker cannot pay to rank higher or to remove criticism. Where a recommended broker has a weakness, we say so.

Freshness and updates

Time-sensitive content (spreads, leverage limits, regulatory status) is reviewed regularly; evergreen content is reviewed periodically. Each page carries an accurate "last updated" date and we never backdate or fake these.

Corrections

We correct errors promptly. If you spot a mistake, contact us via the Contact page and we will review and update the page, noting material corrections where appropriate.