How We Test
Forex Brokers

Regulatory-actions penalty — active since 28 July 2026. Displayed scores now incorporate a documented-enforcement penalty: verified public regulatory actions against a broker’s licensed entities deduct from its score, weighted by severity, recency (5-year window), appeal/finality status, and whether the action targets the retail entity or a group sibling. Actions from one course of conduct are counted once; industry-wide regulator sweeps and voluntary self-disclosures are mitigated (each halves the deduction); market-exit registry removals are disclosed but not scored; and disclosed-but-unresolved matters are shown without being scored. Every reviewed broker’s enforcement record is disclosed on its review page.

One penalty definition feeds both scores: a broker’s review rating = base rating − penalty ÷ 2 (0–5 scale), and its Trust Ranking score = curated trust base − penalty × 10 (0–100 scale, combining regulation quality, fund protection, financial stability, and operating history). Because both derive from the same records, the two pages cannot disagree about a broker’s enforcement history.

Changelog — 28 Jul 2026: Regulatory-actions penalty activated across all reviewed brokers; scores for brokers with in-window enforcement records (including Interactive Brokers, Fortrade, FOREX.com, Saxo Bank, OANDA) adjusted accordingly.

Changelog — 29 Jul 2026: Scoring refined — Fortrade's Belarus (NBRB) deregistration reclassified as a market exit (disclosed, unscored); industry-sweep and self-disclosed enforcement actions now carry a ×0.5 mitigation (e.g. Interactive Brokers' off-channel-communications and voluntarily-disclosed OFAC settlements). Fortrade 3.5→3.9 and Interactive Brokers 3.8→4.0 accordingly.

Changelog — 30 Jul 2026: Rule-consistency pass. An interim regulatory order superseded by a final outcome in the same matter now groups with that outcome — counted once at the greater deduction, the same course-of-conduct rule already applied to parallel-regulator actions. Applied to Fortrade's IIROC 2022 interim order + CIRO 2024 settlement (one OEO matter) → Fortrade 3.9→4.0 (trust 76→79); a standalone final order such as FXCM's 2025 ASIC stop order is unaffected. Separately, the Audit Scorecard dimensions were rebased to the editorial base rating, so the regulatory-actions penalty appears only in the score breakdown and is never double-counted.

Ranking coverage. Every independently-licensed broker we review appears in the Trust Rankings. Prop-firm sub-brands are not ranked separately from their licensed parent — for example Think Capital is a prop brand of ThinkMarkets and is covered under the ThinkMarkets entry, not listed on its own.