How We Review Forex & CFD Brokers
A live regulated broker is not the same product as a prop-firm evaluation challenge. This page explains the criteria we score brokers on, where our data comes from, and — just as important — what we have not independently verified yet.
Our prop-firm scorecard (Challenge Fairness, Payout Reliability, Pricing & Value, Community Trust, Support & Platform) is built for evaluation-model firms where a trader pays a fee to attempt a simulated challenge. Regulated forex/CFD brokers — like Vantage Markets, and the other brokers named in our comparison tables — are a different product entirely: real capital, real market execution, and real financial regulators standing behind (or not standing behind) the account.
That's why brokers get their own 7-criterion weighted scorecard below, led by regulation and safety rather than by pricing alone.
Our Weighted Scoring Criteria
Every broker we cover is evaluated against the same seven criteria. No broker can pay to change these weights or its own score.
| Criterion | Weight | What we check |
|---|---|---|
Regulation & Safety | 25% | Which specific legal entity holds your account, which regulator supervises it (tier-1 vs offshore), whether client funds are segregated, whether negative balance protection is guaranteed vs discretionary, and whether a statutory compensation scheme (FSCS, AFCA, etc.) actually applies to that entity. |
Fees & Spreads | 20% | Published spread and commission figures across account tiers (e.g. Standard STP vs Raw/ECN), compared against the broker's own official pages — not third-party aggregator estimates. Entity-dependent pricing differences are flagged explicitly, not averaged away. |
Platforms | 15% | Which trading platforms are actually offered (MT4, MT5, proprietary apps, TradingView integration), EA/algo support, VPS availability, and whether platform access differs by entity or account type. |
Deposits & Withdrawals | 15% | Funding methods available, minimum deposit by account type, withdrawal processing claims, same-method deposit/withdrawal rules, and any fees — checked against the broker's own funding/AML policy pages rather than assumed from marketing copy. |
Trading Conditions | 10% | Leverage ranges by entity, instrument coverage, execution model (STP/ECN), swap/rollover policy, and whether a swap-free (Islamic) option exists. |
Support | 10% | Support channels advertised (live chat, email, phone), language coverage claims, and whether region-specific support is confirmed or unconfirmed in the broker's own materials. |
Transparency | 5% | Whether the broker's own site clearly discloses entity structure, restricted countries, regulatory incident history, and promotion terms — and whether our own article is honest about what we could and could not independently verify. |
| Total | 100% |
Where Our Facts Come From
Official broker sources first
Regulatory pages, help-center articles, AML/KYC policies, account-terms pages, and spread/fee schedules published directly by the broker. Every specific figure (license number, commission rate, minimum deposit) is tied to a cited official page.
Public regulator registers
Where possible, entity names and license numbers are cross-checked against the regulator's own public register (e.g. the FCA Financial Services Register, ASIC's AFS Licensee Register) rather than taken on the broker's word alone.
Single internal facts file
Every verified fact about Vantage Markets — entities, licenses, leverage, fees, restricted countries — is recorded once in an internal facts file and every article is checked against it, so the same fact can't be stated two different ways in two different articles.
What We Do — and Don't — Test First-Hand
What our review process covers
- Cross-referencing a broker's official documentation against public regulator registers
- Reviewing publicly available demo accounts and platform interfaces for feature availability
- Comparing published cost and platform data across multiple brokers' own documentation
- Flagging cross-source contradictions rather than picking one figure and hiding the conflict
What we have not yet done
- We have not completed a funded live-account test covering KYC, deposit, and withdrawal processing end-to-end for the brokers we cover
- Claims about live-account behavior (withdrawal speed, KYC friction) are sourced from the broker's official terms and independently reported user experiences — not presented as something we personally verified with our own funded account
- Where a figure could not be traced to any official source, the article says so explicitly rather than guessing
We're building a standardized, first-hand test process (test date, account and platform used, step-by-step KYC/deposit/withdrawal verification) to be added to broker reviews once that testing is complete. Until then, treat platform- and process-related claims as documentation-verified, not as first-hand account testing.
Ongoing Verification
Broker terms, regulation, and pricing change. Pages that cover fast-moving details (promotions, spreads, leverage, account terms) carry a "Checked on" date and an Update History section logging what changed and when. Spotted something outdated? Tell us and we'll fix it.
See Our Forex Broker Reviews
Vantage Markets and other brokers, scored on the criteria above.
Read Broker Reviews