How We Test and Rate Forex Brokers

The 8 checks every broker goes through

1. 1. Register verification

   For each broker we list, we confirm the specific serving entity against the regulator's own public register — BaFin (Germany), the FCA (UK), the AFM (Netherlands), CONSOB (Italy), the KNF (Poland), the AMF (France) or the CNMV (Spain), and CySEC where a Cyprus-licensed EU entity is used. Status is recorded as "regulated" or "pending" per regulator — never assumed regulated by default.

2. 2. Entity-not-brand check

   A broker group can hold a strong EU or UK licence in one legal entity while onboarding residents of a different country to an offshore arm of the same brand, with no ESMA/FCA protections. We check which entity actually serves each of our seven markets, not just which licence the brand advertises.

3. 3. ESMA-regulation-literacy scoring

   We confirm each broker's own published terms disclose: the 30:1 retail leverage cap on major currency pairs, mandatory negative-balance protection, and the absence of deposit-bonus or inducement offers to retail clients (banned EU-wide and in the UK). A broker offering a "welcome bonus" to EU/UK retail traders is flagged as a compliance concern, not listed as a perk.

4. 4. Cost-disclosure literacy

   We check whether a broker's own rate card and terms disclose spread, commission and overnight financing (swap) clearly enough that a trader could compute the all-in cost themselves. This is a check on the QUALITY of the broker's own disclosure — we do not publish our own spread, minimum-deposit or star-rating figures (see "What we deliberately don't do" below).

5. 5. Platform & funding verification

   We confirm which trading platforms (MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, cTrader, proprietary platforms) and which funding rails (SEPA, card, iDEAL, Giropay, bank wire) a broker actually publishes as supported, sourced directly from the broker's own site — never assumed from a competitor's listing.

6. 6. Market-promotion-eligibility check

   Before any content is drafted for a given market, we check whether paid CFD promotion to retail clients is restricted there. France (Loi Sapin II) and Spain (CNMV, 2023) are treated as information-only regardless of any broker's regulatory status — no partner link, no "open an account" framing on those pages.

7. 7. Warning-list cross-check

   We cross-reference each broker's domain and known entity names against the official regulator warning lists we track across the AMF, CySEC, BaFin and CONSOB registers before listing it. See our dedicated dataset on this — 522 verified forex/CFD warning-list entries across four regulators.

8. 8. Re-verification, not a one-off

   A register check is a snapshot, not a permanent fact — licences change, firms get added to warning lists, terms get rewritten. See "Update cadence" below for how often we re-check.

What we deliberately don't do

Honesty about our limits is the point of this page, not a disclaimer buried at the bottom.

• ✕ We do not claim hands-on testing. We have not opened live trading accounts with these brokers ourselves. Every fact on Spreadwise is a register-verified or publicly-documented fact, not a first-hand trading experience — and we say so plainly rather than imply otherwise with review-site conventions (star ratings, "we tested") that would misrepresent what we've actually done. If that changes, we will update this page and say so.
• ✕ We do not publish a star rating, a minimum deposit or a typical spread figure. These fields exist in our broker data model and are deliberately left null (rating: null, minDeposit: null, typicalSpread: null) rather than estimated or copied from a broker's marketing page. The same discipline applies to schema.org markup: feesAndCommissionsSpecification and aggregateRating are deliberately omitted from our structured data — not fabricated, not left to a search engine to infer.
• ✕ We do not accept payment for a better placement or a more favourable review. Some links on Spreadwise are partner links (see our affiliate disclosure) but a commission relationship never changes the regulatory facts we report.
• ✕ We do not use bonus or inducement language, anywhere. ESMA and the FCA ban trading bonuses to retail clients; treating one as a selling point would be actively misleading.

Who does the work

Research, register verification and drafting on Spreadwise are carried out by Pipex, our fully-disclosed AI research agent — not a hidden bot, and never presented as a human. Pipex checks broker regulatory status directly against official registers, pulls cost data only from a broker's own published terms, and leaves a figure blank rather than guessing. Every piece bylined Pipex is reviewed and signed off by a real, named, accountable person: Eitan Gorodetsky, Editorial Strategist at Lead Media, the company that operates Spreadwise. Full disclosure of the toolchain and verification stack is on our about-the-ai page.

Update cadence

Register status and broker terms are re-checked on a rolling basis, targeting no more than 30 days since the last verification for any live page — our house freshness standard for peak-YMYL content. A change to a broker's regulatory status, an addition to a regulator warning list, or a withdrawn licence triggers an immediate update, not a wait for the next scheduled pass. The date below is when this methodology itself was last reviewed.

Frequently asked questions