Our scoring rubric, in one paragraph
Every firm in our directory is scored 0–10 on four axes, using the same rubric in the same order. We don’t adjust the rubric to favour a firm we partner with, and we don’t adjust it to penalise a firm we don’t. The four axes are conditions, support, payouts, and platform. FTMO is our anchor reference at ~9 on most axes — when we score a new firm, we ask “is this firm better or worse than FTMO at X?” before we touch a number.
The four axes
1. Conditions
Spreads, leverage, slippage, instrument coverage, and platform stability under load. A 10 means institutional-tier execution. A 5 means mediocre retail. We score this from the firm’s real funded-account spec — not the demo, not the marketing page.
2. Support
Response time, accuracy, and how the firm handles disputed account closures or rule-breach claims. We weigh public Discord and Reddit reports heavily here. A firm that “passes” the challenge stage but ghosts traders during payout disputes is scored down even when its product looks great on paper.
3. Payouts
Speed from approved request to bank or crypto delivery, fee burden, minimum thresholds, and historical reliability. We track this against the firm’s claimed cycle — a firm that promises bi-weekly but delivers monthly gets penalised. Public payout proofs (with redacted PII) are how we calibrate this.
4. Platform
Native UI and dashboard quality, mobile parity, and account-management features. This is not the trading platform itself (that’s under Conditions). It’s the firm’s own portal: does the dashboard show your current drawdown in real time, or do you have to calculate it from your equity curve?
How we verify numbers
Every numeric claim on every review traces back to a sourceUrl and sourceCapturedAt in our challenge dataset. Prices, profit splits, daily-drawdown percentages, payout cycles — all captured from the firm’s public-facing pages, and re-verified on a rolling schedule. If a firm’s website changes a number, we change ours within seven days or we flag the review as stale.
If we can’t verify a number against a primary source, we write null in the data and add a note explaining what we’d need to confirm it. We never invent fills or estimate “typical” numbers.
The True-Cost calculation
Every review’s True-Cost table is computed in code, not by hand. The function takes the challenge price, account size, profit split, daily-loss cap, and max-loss cap, and returns three numbers:
- Break-even profit: how much trader-side profit the funded account must generate before the first payout repays the challenge fee.
- R-multiple: break-even profit divided by the dollar value of the max-loss cap. R < 1 means the trader can afford to lose more than they need to make. R > 1 means the math is against them.
- Days to break even: how many trading days it would take at +1 % per day (capped at the firm’s daily-loss limit).
You can see the function in lib/firms.ts if you want to audit our work. Same inputs always produce the same outputs.
How we handle affiliate relationships
We earn a commission on some firms when traders sign up through our links. We disclose this on every review page. Our scoring rubric does not change based on whether a firm is a partner. If anything, we’re more critical of partners, because we don’t want to send our readers to a firm that will burn them.
A firm being on our review list does not mean we have a partnership with them. We review firms because they matter to traders, not because they pay us.
What we don’t do
- We don’t accept sponsorship for “positive review” placement.
- We don’t hide negative findings to keep a partnership intact.
- We don’t republish firm press releases as “news.”
- We don’t score firms we haven’t actually trialled or whose payout history we can’t verify.
Spot a mistake?
Every review has a publication and last-updated date in the meta strip. If a number has gone stale or a rule has changed, tell us and we’ll fix it. Most corrections are live within 48 hours.