About the editorial team behind this review
Who prepares these pages, what we can and cannot tell you, and how you can hold us to account.
See partner conditionsUnderstand what a review can and cannot do
A reader once wrote to us after opening an account, quoting a line from our EightCap review about spreads and asking why the figure they saw on their own screen was higher. The answer was neither dramatic nor reassuring: the number we had published was correct for the conditions we observed on the day we checked, and the reader traded during a different session, on a different instrument, with different liquidity. That exchange shaped how we describe our work. A review is a record of what one team observed at particular moments, not a forecast and not a guarantee. It cannot tell you whether a broker suits your circumstances, because we do not know your circumstances. It cannot tell you whether a platform will stay stable under load, whether a withdrawal will arrive on the day you expect it, or whether the terms you accepted will remain unchanged six months from now.
What a review can do is narrower and, we think, more useful. It can set out the terms as they are written, compare them with the way the service behaves in practice, and flag where the two do not match. It can describe the trading costs we measured, the instruments we could and could not access, and the way customer support responded when we asked ordinary questions. It can point out conditions buried in the client agreement that a reader might otherwise miss. It cannot replace your own checks before you deposit money, and it is not a recommendation to open an account with anyone. This site provides no financial services, holds no client funds, and does not open accounts on anyone's behalf.
Trace where the facts come from
Almost everything we publish starts with primary material. That means the broker's own legal documents, published fee schedules, product lists and platform documentation, read in full rather than skimmed for headlines. Where we state a cost, we have usually measured it: placing the same sample trades at different times and recording what was charged, then repeating the exercise later to see whether the figure holds. Where we describe the platform, we have used it on a funded account of our own rather than relying on screenshots supplied by the company.
We keep notes of what we checked and when, and we do not publish a figure we cannot trace back to a document or a recorded test. Where something cannot be verified from outside, we say so in the text instead of filling the gap with an assumption. We do not accept payment for coverage, and no commercial arrangement influences what appears on the page. If a claim in a review rests on a single observation, the wording reflects that limit.
Challenge anything you think is wrong
If a reader finds a statement on this site that does not match what they see, we want to hear about it. The practical route is the contact form on this site; messages sent that way reach the editorial team directly. Tell us which page and which sentence, and if you can, what you observed and when. Screenshots of a fee, a platform message or a term in an agreement are the most useful evidence, though we understand readers cannot always provide them.
We read every substantive challenge and check it against our own notes and the underlying documents. Where a reader is right, we correct the page and note that a correction has been made. Where the difference turns on timing, account type or region, we try to explain that in the text rather than dismiss the query. We do not remove accurate material because a reader disagrees with it, and we do not edit pages to suit the broker's preferences. The editorial team answers these messages itself; there is no queue of outside reviewers to pass them to.
Revisit pages and score the broker
Conditions at any broker move, and a review that is not revisited becomes misleading within a season. We return to each published page on a scheduled basis, and sooner when something material changes: a new fee schedule, a revised client agreement, a platform update or a shift in the instruments offered. Every page carries the date of its last review so a reader can judge how current it is. Revisiting means repeating the checks, not rereading the old text, and the outcome is sometimes a rewrite rather than a small edit.
Our scoring follows the same discipline. We assess the broker against fixed criteria, including the trading costs we measured, the range of instruments available to Australian readers, the clarity of the legal documents, the behaviour of the platform during our tests, and the quality of responses from support. Each criterion is scored from what we observed, and the weighting is set before we begin so the result cannot be adjusted to fit an impression. We publish the reasoning alongside the score, which lets a reader see where the weight falls and disagree with our judgement rather than simply accept a number. A score is a summary of our findings on a given date, nothing more.
