Our goal is to help you find the right Proprietary Trading Firm or Forex Broker for your needs.
Everything you find on Forex Prop Reviews is based on reliable data and unbiased information. We are proud to share with you how our 30+ years of experience in finance, combined with readers’ feedback, create the foundation of your Forex Prop Reviews experience.
We revise our methodology every time, fine-tuning all our criteria to be able to perfectly evaluate any broker service.
We check close to 500 criteria
We evaluate the same 9 key areas and criteria for all Proprietary Trading Firms and Forex Brokers.
Every year, we fine-tune our methodology based on our own and our users’ experiences. At the moment, we check 473 criteria for each company altogether, as detailed in the following table:
*Covers information like the country of origin, which is not included in the scoring.
During the course of 2020, we added new reviews to Forex Prop Reviews while also keeping our older ones up to date. This means that we edited more than 70 companies and 25,000 data points.
In addition to the above criteria, we also have a database that collects which countries each company accepts clients from. We capture this data for 227 countries and territories.
We also started to experiment with automation and scraping, adding thousands of new data points to our ever-expanding methodology.
We check companies anonymously with a live account
Everything in our reviews is based on first-hand experience: we open a live account at each firm and deposit real money. The company does not know we are testing. During the test, we give a note of what we experience in our methodology based on our criteria.
Final scores based on our expertise and readers’ preferences
After we checked the criteria for the company, we convert the findings into scores, using different weights.
The weighting of these criteria is based on our professional experience and our readers’ preferences, to make sure that the final score truly reflects what clients are looking for or what areas matter to them.
At the end of each year, we update the scoring weights. In the table below, you can see how the ranking of weights changed for 2021, which areas moved up or down in importance.
One last note: all the firms you come across on Forex Prop Reviews are monitored by at least one top-tier financial regulator, therefore they are definitely not scams. We also prefer reviewing companies that are listed on a stock exchange or have a banking background.
Let’s talk about 9 areas we have
1. Fees
We gather fee info straight from the company’ sites. For Forex Brokers we check all fees that occur for all asset classes, e.g.: for stocks, forex, funds, crypto and so on. We uncover hidden costs and dig deep into both trading and non-trading fees: to find your real costs we calculate fees for buying a position, holding it for one week and selling it. Also, we collect data automatically for certain fee data points, to be up to date.
For all Proprietary Trading Firms, we check the entry fee, which could be monthly or one-time. We also check the prices for resets and so on.
2. Security
This is about mapping the company’ legal landscape, making sure who regulates which entity, the investor/trader protection you get, what history and background the firm has.
This is vital for the security of your investment, therefore this area is weighted properly.
3. Deposit and withdrawal
For Forex Brokers we deposit and withdraw real funds to test how the process works. The methods, costs and time required to deposit and withdraw money are of special interest to readers. All of these aspects are weighted. A company that allows the use of credit cards for free is scored higher than the one where only wire transfer is available, which usually holds a charge.
For the Proprietary Trading Firms, we pass the evaluation stages and withdraw the profit that we make.
4. Account opening
We dedicate the time to open real accounts at firms. There are times, where the list of required documents can be unclear for an everyday user. Apart from this, we compile information on several aspects of account opening, like the ease of the process itself, what account types are offered and the minimum deposits required.
5. Trading platforms
Your trading comfort is significantly affected depending on what type of platform you use. It can be a platform dedicated to PC-s (this is what we call desktop platforms), a mobile platform, or a browser-based web platform.
Each trading platform is tested by us, focusing on general user experience, as well as on specific features like placing orders, authentication options and customizability.
6. Product portfolio
Companies are scored based on the number of markets they have available for you and the product selection they provide.
A company that has more product types will get a higher score than a broker that only offers CFDs for example.
7. Research
Higher costs can be justified by a range of in-depth, unique and useful research tools. These allow you to get information on market sentiments, trends, tickers and companies.
We look at all of the research tools the companies provide.
8. Customer service
Each support method is tested personally by Forex Prop Reviews team members. The customer service scores of each firm are based on 8 meaningful interactions with their support service, trying all their methods be it live chat, email or phone.
9. Education
Well-structured and quality educational content can help you to be more comfortable with the companies’ platform, or trading itself.
Companies with useful, information-packed education tools earn higher ratings. These tools include webinars, videos, podcasts, articles – you name it.
