BrokerChooser's methodology

Q: Do you treat brokers that pay differently?

No, and we never will. We feature more than 100 brokers on our website and only half of them are contracted partners. Our goal is to build a user-first product and be 100% transparent - the scores on our website strictly come from the methodology discussed above.

BrokerChooser is an online broker comparison platform. We review top-tier regulated well-established players in the financial industry focusing on brokers. We cover more than 100 financial service providers globally by checking each of them through over 500 data points.

Table of contents

1. Intro

2. What we check

3. Weight of areas in the methodology

4. About our broker analysts

5. Our values

6. FAQ

What we check

We review all brokers by checking them through the same data points and aspects, making it possible to compare them independently. Our data points come from hands-on experience: we opened an account and tested all providers with our real money.

Areas	Why is it important?	Number of collected data points
Fees	We gather all fees related to the service on all the asset types available: trading fees, non-trading fees, deposit, and withdrawal-related fees, and inactivity charges. We collect the data from the provider's site, and customer support, and we also trade with them to check if the information is valid.	289
Safety	We check the brokers' legal background. We confirm if they are overseen by a trusted regulator and if they offer investor protection. We only feature top-tier regulated brokers. This score signals what additional layers there are to ensure the broker's safety.	33
Deposit and withdrawal	We make sure you are aware of the costs, the different methods, and the time it takes to deposit and withdraw your money at the broker. We do this by depositing and withdrawing from the provider with our own money.	11
Trading platforms	We test each trading platform, focusing on the user experience and specific features like placing orders, authentication options, and customizability.	43
Account opening	We open real accounts with brokers and check how easy the process is, what account types are available and whether a minimum deposit is required. We also list the required documents.	15
Markets and products	We check the number of markets the broker gives you access to, and the products they offer. A broker that has more product types will get a higher score.	62
Customer Service	Each customer support channel is tested personally through 8 interactions at different times, be it live chat, email, or phone.	12
Customer Support	Brokers with useful, information-packed education tools earn higher ratings. These tools may include webinars, videos, podcasts, and articles.	6
Research	We check the research tools the broker provides, and we look for in-depth, unique, and useful tools that give you information on market sentiment, trends, tickers, and companies.	9
+1 General information	It covers areas like country of origin, which is not included in the scoring.	17

BrokerChooser's data-driven methodology is based on industry standards and is always evolving based on customer insights and feedback.

Our users contribute to the methodology via multiple channels, we made 75 surveys and 45 user interviews last year.

Weight of areas in the methodology

About our broker analysts

Our 10-member broker analyst team come from different walks of life but they are all committed to making sense of the brokerage world. Our experts bring their experience from the world of finance and have various experiences in trading, investing, brokerage, and banking.

It takes our team 7-10 days to research, write and double-check each of the reviews you see on BrokerChooser. It takes approximately 90 working hours per broker to get a quality output for every single review. In order to keep the reviews and our tools completely up to date, the whole portfolio is regularly updated multiple times a year.

Our values

BrokerChooser's core mission is to help people invest by finding the right broker for them. We built our methodology on these pillars:

We are independent, we are operating with total integrity. Brokers or other financial service providers do not influence our scoring by paying or pressuring us.
Our website reviews brokers based on the same methodology and our recommendations are unbiased.
We work transparently to ensure that our scores and recommendations are solely the result of our analysts’ work and are independent of our agreements with the brokers.
Our in-depth analysis builds on real information: we open a live account and test all products with our own money.

FAQ

Are the brokers on your website safe?

We only feature brokers that have at least one top-tier regulator as a financial authority. We think this is one of the most important aspects of safety. Nevertheless, there are other factors that we check, like the legal background, investment protection services, and financial health of a given company - this will give you even more detailed information on their safety.

Do you treat brokers that pay differently?

No, and we never will. We feature more than 100 brokers on our website and only half of them are contracted partners. Our goal is to build a user-first product and be 100% transparent - the scores on our website strictly come from the methodology discussed above.

How many people are working on this?

Our team of 10 experts is working on our reviews on a daily basis.

How often do you refresh the data?

We update our content throughout the year continuously. We keep tabs on all of the brokers during the year, so we can incorporate any changes as soon as possible. If needed, we hold annual update work sessions to focus on improving our content.