Selection starts with the licence. A firm only enters the pool once we have found its authorisation on the regulator's public register, read its client-money disclosure and confirmed whether negative balance protection is contractual or discretionary. Firms that could not evidence segregated client money were removed before any pricing was measured.
Cost is then sampled programmatically rather than read off a website. We record live bid-ask on a fixed instrument basket every fifteen minutes through all three main sessions, then add the published commission and the financing actually charged on our own statements. That produces one comparable number per firm, which is what the table further down this page shows.
Execution is timed in milliseconds from submission to confirmed fill. We log slippage in both directions — not only the direction that flatters the broker — and count requotes, partial fills and rejections. We deliberately trade through scheduled releases, because a firm that behaves perfectly at 11am and falls over at the interest-rate decision is not a firm you want holding your stop.
Platform and service are scored last: order-ticket clarity, whether the platform restates cost before you send, alert syncing between phone and desktop, charting depth, and how long a human takes to answer a real question. Pepperstone finished top of this list because it was the most consistent across all four measures, not because it won any single one by a wide margin.
We also test withdrawals. Every firm on this page has had money taken out of it by our desk, and we record how many working days it took. It is a dull test and it is the single most revealing one, because a broker's true attitude to your money shows up when you ask for it back.