Choose your broker. Without getting played.

01 Our mission

Helping retail investors choose a broker with their eyes open

Opening an account with a broker puts part of your savings on the line. That decision deserves more than reading an opaque ranking or an Instagram ad. Our mission is to make public and defensible the information that genuinely makes a difference: who actually regulates the entity taking you on, where the fees are hidden (spreads, FX conversion, inactivity), who executes your orders behind the scenes, and what happens if the broker defaults.

We want turning a broker down for the right reasons to be as easy as accepting it. Regardless of its marketing budget, how long it has been around, or whether it partners with us.

This site is not investment advice. It is editorial documentation that gives you the elements to decide. The decision, and its consequences, remain yours.

02 Our editorial charter

Six rules we stick to

1. Test before we rate. No broker receives a score until we have opened a real account, funded it with at least $2,000, executed around fifty orders and read the contract line by line. No press treatment, no shortcuts: we go through the same experience as any ordinary client.

2. Sign every review. No collective by-lines, no pseudonyms. The editor who ran the test is named on the page, along with their number of reviews to date and a contact address. If you dispute a score, you know who to write to.

3. Publish the score even when we are a partner. The affiliate contracts we sign contain no editorial clause. When a broker asks for a minimum score or preferential placement, we refuse. Our independence does not rest on promises: it rests on the fact that we lose deals.

4. Document, don't advise. We give you verifiable facts (fees in plain terms, the exact regulator, deposit guarantees, incident history). We don't tell you what to do with your money. That job belongs to regulated financial investment advisers.

5. Keep it current, or take it down. Every review is refreshed at least once a quarter. Material changes (regulator, fees, a published incident) trigger an immediate revision. A review we can no longer keep up to date is unpublished.

6. Five countries, five scores. A broker can be excellent in the United Kingdom thanks to the FCA and FSCS coverage, and mediocre in France where its FX conversion fees are punishing. We score market by market. No vague global average.

03 Our foundation

We build on the supervisory authorities

Before a broker goes through our testing process, it must appear in the register of the national regulator for its operating entity — the SEC and FINRA in the United States, the FCA in the United Kingdom, ASIC in Australia, CySEC in the EU, and the equivalent authority in every other market. No official listing in those registers, no assessment published on our site, whatever the broker's marketing budget.

For every country we cover, we take the local supervisory authority as our compass. It is the only truly reliable filter. When a broker operates from several jurisdictions, we examine separately the entity that opens your account, not the global marketing brand that may switch a French investor onto a Cypriot subsidiary without them realising.

We continuously monitor these authorities' communications: published sanctions, licence suspensions, scam alerts, blacklists. When a regulator adds a broker to a blacklist or withdraws a licence, we revise the review within 48 hours. Including when the broker is a commercial partner.

This deliberate reliance on regulators saves us from two classic traps: scoring an offshore broker on the strength of its marketing alone, and missing a material regulatory decision between two quarterly updates.

04 Our method

Six pillars, weighted in public

Our scores rest on six weighted dimensions: regulation and security (25%), fees (25%), instruments (15%), platform (15%), support (10%), transparency (10%). The detail of each pillar (sub-criteria, sources, penalties) is documented in our public methodology.

The overall score is not a raw weighted average: we automatically cap certain pillars depending on another (an offshore broker cannot reach a "Regulation and security" score above 5/10, for example). The capping rules are public as well.

The weighting evolves. When a regulatory change or a market event makes a criterion more important (for instance the new ESMA leverage rules in 2018, or the FCA sanctions against certain execution models in 2023), we update the weightings and announce it publicly.

05 Independence

How we assess brokers in full independence

HelloBrokers assesses every broker against a single methodology: six pillars weighted in public, a real test on a funded account, a review signed by a named editor. The same grid applies to everyone, commercial partners or not.

So that this independence is not just a marketing promise, we organise it concretely:

• Commercial contracts do not touch the editorial. No broker can negotiate its score, its placement in our rankings, or the wording of a review paragraph. When a broker demands it, we refuse and we cover it anyway. We lose deals several times a year for this reason.

• The score is published before the partnership. When we activate an affiliate programme, the score is already locked. A broker cannot "buy" a better rating by offering a more generous partnership.

• We also cover non-affiliated brokers. When a broker has no affiliate programme (premium brokers, niche brokers, foreign brokers beyond our reach), we still score it if it is editorially relevant. Broker pages clearly indicate when a link is sponsored and when it is not.

On the revenue side, we are funded by the affiliate commissions paid by certain brokers when a visitor opens an account through one of our links. Visitors pay nothing, the brokers assessed do not pay to appear in our rankings. Sponsored links are flagged on every broker page.

The full detail of the model lives in our affiliate disclosure.

06 The team

A named editor. Not algorithms.

Editing is currently handled by Simon Dalmat, editor-in-chief. He has covered online brokers since 2018, previously at FT Adviser and Citywire. IMC (Investment Management Certificate) from CFA UK, finance master's from LSE. Every review he publishes is signed by name, with a direct contact address. If you dispute a score, you know who to write to.

This compact format is an editorial choice. To treat our brokers active across several markets seriously, we prefer a single editor who digs deep rather than a diluted team. When we open a new market, we will recruit an editor dedicated to that market, with the same prerogatives: signing their reviews, defending their scores, refusing commercial arrangements.

For the full profile and publication history, see our editorial page.

07 Publisher

Who is behind the site

HelloBrokers is published by HelloSafe SAS, a simplified joint-stock company with capital of €1,588.36, registered with the Rennes Trade and Companies Register under number 883 069 593. HelloSafe also publishes hellosafe.fr, a comparison site for insurance and consumer financial products in France. For the full legal contact details, see our legal notice.

HelloBrokers is an independent editorial publication. We are not financial investment advisers (CIF) and provide no personalised recommendation. Any investment decision is your sole responsibility. The risk of capital loss on derivative products (CFDs, forex, options) is real.