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Marketpedia is free to read, and that has to be paid for somehow. This page sets out precisely how the site earns money, which links carry commission, what a broker can and cannot buy, and the internal rules that keep commercial arrangements away from the research desk.
We publish this in detail rather than as a one-line footnote, because a comparison site that will not explain its own incentives has not earned the right to tell you which broker to trust.
FCA regulated, FSCS £85K, since 1974
Rated 4.9 out of 5 after live-account testing by the desk.
Min spread
0.6 pips
Min deposit
£0
Regulator
FCA
Best for
Deepest UK market coverage
CFDs are complex instruments. Your capital is at risk.
Document details
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This document is published in full rather than summarised, because the detail is the point. Each numbered section below covers one subject only, so you can read the part that applies to you without wading through the rest, and every section is written in plain English rather than the compressed legal shorthand that makes policies like this go unread.
We keep the wording current. Where a rule changes, a supplier changes or our own practice changes, the affected section is rewritten and the date at the top of the page is updated with it — we do not leave superseded text in place and rely on you not noticing. If any part of this page is unclear, the desk answers questions on it directly and will explain the reasoning behind a clause rather than simply quoting it back.
Nothing on this page is financial advice and nothing here creates an advisory relationship. Marketpedia publishes independent research and education about brokers and markets; decisions about where you open an account and what you trade remain entirely your own, and leveraged products carry a real risk of losing more than you expect.
Use the quick links below to jump straight to a section, or read the page from top to bottom — it is short enough to do in a single sitting.
The majority of our revenue comes from affiliate arrangements with brokers. When you follow a link from this site, open an account and meet the broker's qualifying conditions, the broker or their affiliate network may pay us a fee. That fee costs you nothing: your spreads, commissions, minimum deposit and account terms are identical whether you arrive through us or type the broker's address directly.
A smaller portion of revenue comes from clearly labelled sponsored placements in our email briefing and from licensing our research data to media partners. Sponsored content is always marked as such, is never presented as an editorial verdict, and never appears inside a ranking table or a review score.
We do not sell reader email addresses, do not pass your personal details to brokers, and do not operate lead-generation forms that hand your contact information to a sales team. The only thing that travels with your click is an anonymous referral identifier.
A broker cannot buy a rating, a rank, a category win, an editor's pick badge, a favourable sentence in a review or the removal of a criticism. Those decisions are made by the research desk against fixed, published weights before any commercial discussion takes place, and they are not revisited because a partner is unhappy.
A broker cannot buy inclusion either. Firms are listed because they hold live FCA authorisation and passed our verification checks, not because a partnership exists. Several firms in our tables pay us nothing at all, and they are ranked exactly as their testing results dictate.
Equally, refusing an affiliate arrangement carries no penalty. If a broker declines to work with us commercially, or terminates an arrangement after an unfavourable review, its scores and position remain unchanged. Where we cannot link commercially to a well-rated firm, we still name it and tell you to go direct.
Scoring and commercial negotiation are handled by different people. Analysts who open accounts, record spreads and write reviews do not negotiate rates, do not see partner revenue figures for the firms they are testing, and are not compensated on the commercial performance of any individual broker.
Every score is produced from an evidence file: timestamped spread samples, execution logs, funding and withdrawal timings, register screenshots and support response times. A rating cannot be changed without a corresponding change to that evidence, and every revision is recorded with a date and a reason.
Where a partner disputes a finding, they get the same route as any reader: submit the evidence, and if it stands up the page is corrected publicly. Commercial pressure applied outside that process is logged internally, and it has no effect on what is published.
Rankings are the output of four fixed weights applied identically to every firm: all-in trading cost at 35%, execution quality at 25%, safety of client funds at 25%, and platform and support at 15%. The weights are published, applied mechanically, and not adjusted between firms or between review cycles.
Cost is measured as a comparable round-trip figure per instrument, combining spread sampled across sessions, commission and overnight financing. Execution covers fill latency, slippage in both directions, requotes and rejections during scheduled data. Safety covers register verification, client-money segregation, FSCS eligibility and withdrawal reliability.
Because the inputs are measurements rather than impressions, two analysts running the same evidence file reach the same score. That is deliberate: it makes the ranking auditable and removes the space in which commercial preference could quietly operate.
Links that may earn us a fee sit alongside a standing disclosure in the site footer and on every page that carries them, and this page is linked from the footer of every single page on the site. We use plain wording rather than buried asterisks, and we do not disguise commission links as neutral navigation.
Sponsored placements in the email briefing carry an explicit sponsored label in the same size type as the surrounding copy. They never appear in the ranked sections of an email and never reference a rating or a position in our tables.
Where an article compares products and one is a commercial partner, the disclosure appears in that article, not only in the footer. If we ever cannot disclose an arrangement clearly, our rule is simple: we do not take it.
You pay nothing to use this site and nothing extra to the broker for arriving through it. Using our links supports independent testing that costs real money to run, because we fund live accounts, pay real spreads and absorb real trading losses in order to measure them.
You are never obliged to use our links. If you would rather not create an attribution, go to the broker directly or decline non-essential cookies; our research is identical either way and nothing is withheld behind a commercial gate.
If you believe a review reads as though it were bought, tell us. Email info@marketpedia.co.uk with the page and the passage, and we will re-open the evidence file and publish the outcome. Independence that cannot be challenged is not independence at all.