Our thoroughly conducted Broker Reviews evaluate the following criterias and aspects among several more and may support you in your decision process:

Regulation/License

This is one of the most important aspects when choosing a broker. A broker that is regulated by competent authorities has to comply with numerous rules and regulations that intent to increase the protection of the traders with multiple measures ranging from negative balance protection to compensation funds and to keep the market of brokers free of bad actors as well as to ensure fair play and a minimum quality of the offered services. It is therefore essential to only use properly regulated and licensed brokers.

Payment Methods

A broker that offers many different methods for deposits and withdrawals does not only allow its traders more flexibility in funding their account and receiving their invested capital, but also shows that it conducts a serious business as payment providers highly scrutinize businesses in the financial/trading sector nowadays. However, while a small number of available payment methods is not necessarily proof for a bad or untrustworthy broker, a high number of reputable payment methods/gateways is usually seen as a positive factor.

Fees

The fees that a broker charges for each trade or per order can sometimes be rather complex and intransparent. To get the most out of winning trades and to not unnecessarily blow up losing trades with high commissions, low fees are an important factor as well. There are different models of fees that brokers can implement:

  • Spreads (difference between bid and ask price; can be fixed or variable depending on market situation/volatility),
  • Commissions (percentage of the trading volume and can either be fixed or variable depending on market situation/volatility) and a
  • combination of Spreads and Commissions.

Most brokers utilize spreads as their fee model and while some have generally higher spreads, others can have very tight spreads. Also in volatile situations the spreads of one broker can fluctuate much more and much stronger than the spreads of another broker. The same applies for the commission model. Especially when a broker offers different fee/commission models with different account types, it can be worth it for a trader to evaluate each account type and to check which model offers the lowest fees for the trader’s individual trading style. The commission model is often considered to be more transparent than spreads.

Tradable Assets

The number of tradable assets differs more or less from broker to broker. Most brokers generally have at least a solid selection of the most common assets in the categories Forex (like EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY etc.), Commodities (like Gold, Silver, Oil etc.), Indices (like Dow, Nasdaq, Dax etc.) and some popular US Stocks. A well-assorted broker can also offer more exotic currency pairs, ETFs, crypto CFDs and a wider selection of up to thousands of international stocks. Some brokers provide access to a high number of international stocks via separate stock trading accounts that offer the best conditions for trading this specific type of asset.

Platform

The broker platform is not only defined by the different available account types, but also by the software and interfaces that can be used to execute orders on the trading account. While the most widely-known trading software for Windows PC and mobile devices is MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, especially beginners in the field of trading find it rather difficult to understand and use this software. Also Mac or Linux users can only run MetaTrader by using the free software “Wine” that makes it possible to run certain Windows applications also on Mac or Linux. But this cannot be considered to be a stable solution for trading and is not ideal if real money is at risk. Therefore, it can be seen as a very welcome circumstance that some brokers offer their own web interfaces and mobile apps that can provide users with a more user-friendly, intuitive and cross-platform solution.

Trust and Reputation

A broker has to gather trust and reputation among the community of traders over years. While the before mentioned regulation and license of a broker is a very important aspect, it can only be the basis on which trust and positive reputation is build upon. Therefore, the history of a broker, the quality of a broker’s support team, information about relevant stakeholders and ratings as well as reviews of current and former traders who used and experienced a broker’s service have to be evaluated as part of a broker’s trust score.