Ten forex brokers, opened and emptied with our own money.
We funded a live account at every broker on this page, traded it through calm sessions
and scheduled releases, then requested the whole balance back and timed how long it took
to arrive. Nothing below comes from a broker's marketing pack. This is the 2026 edition
of the audit, scored on eight weighted pillars and re-tested every ninety days.
Written by James Cole, Head of Broker Testing·Regulatory fact-check by Priya Nair·Updated August 2026·How we test
Awards use the recorded evidence and the published fee-weighted category rule. A tie is broken by the category pillar — never by a commercial relationship.
IUX is shown at #2 in our Best Overall Annual Awards table as a featured editorial placement. It is not a natural scoring result, an external award, or a claim that another publisher ranked IUX #2.
Section 02
Fee-aware broker ranking
Ordered 0–100 using 70% Trust factors and 30% verified fee evidence; Trust Score remains visible separately. See the formula →
Trust Score leaderboard: 141 brokers ranked 0–100 on safety,
regulatory reach and longevity, with cost and account terms alongside.
Mwali International Services Authority (MISA), ComorosNone — Cook Islands company registration onlyNone — St Vincent and the Grenadines company registration only
Tier-1 authorities are shown in green, tier-2 in blue, tier-3 in amber. The home-table order is a value-aware score: 70% Trust factors and 30% verified fee evidence. Audited brokers use the Fees & Costs pillar; unreviewed brokers use a conservative spread proxy, and missing fee evidence earns no fee points. Visit-link commissions do not change the formula.
IUX (IUX Markets) is a featured partner of fxproof.com. Its position on this table is a placement choice, not a score: every figure and score shown passes the same verification as every other row.
Section 03
How we actually test a broker
Five stages, 14 months, £18,000 of our own money.
Broker testing is unglamorous work. It is mostly waiting: for a document to be approved,
for a deposit to clear, for a payout desk to answer on a Friday afternoon. We do it
anyway, because those waits are the part of a broker relationship you cannot see from
the outside until your money is already inside. Here is the whole process, in order.
01
We open the account as an ordinary retail client
No press accounts, no demo logins, no analyst contact at the broker. We complete the same application form as any reader, upload the same identity documents, and answer the same suitability questions.
The clock starts at the first form field and stops when the account can accept money. Anything that trips the application — a rejected document, an odd suitability question, a jurisdiction switch we were not warned about — is recorded and shows up in the account-opening pillar.
Accounts opened
10
Median KYC time
1 day
02
We fund it with our own money
Every broker receives a real deposit from our own budget, sent through the payment method most readers will use rather than the one the broker prefers. We record the clearing time, the exchange rate applied, and anything deducted before the balance appears.
This is the point where a large share of the fee story emerges. Conversion spreads on the deposit leg are invisible in any fee schedule and only appear when your money physically lands.
Capital deployed
£18,000
Minimum per broker
£300
03
We trade it, in calm markets and in news
At least forty live orders go through each platform: market, limit, stop and, where supported, trailing orders. Half are placed in quiet mid-session conditions and half inside the two minutes around a scheduled release, because those are the moments a pricing engine is honest about itself.
We log fill latency, slippage against the quoted price, requotes and rejections. Spread samples are taken repeatedly through the London and New York sessions rather than screenshotted once at the quietest hour of the day.
Live orders placed
400+
Spread samples
9,600+
04
We take all the money back out
At the end of testing we request a full withdrawal of the remaining balance and start a stopwatch. We measure request to processed, processed to cleared, and note every fee, every extra document request and every message that arrives asking us to reconsider.
Withdrawal behaviour carries fifteen per cent of the score on its own. A broker with excellent spreads and a slow, defensive payout desk will not finish near the top of our table, and that is deliberate.
Full withdrawals
10
Fastest cleared
4 hours
05
We score, cross-check and date it
Each of the eight pillars is scored from the recorded evidence, then combined using the fixed public weights. Nothing is scored from memory or from the broker's own material.
Before publication, a second analyst re-checks every regulatory claim against the register of the authority named. Each review then carries the analyst's name and a review date, and goes back into the queue for re-testing every ninety days.
Re-test interval
90 days
Method version
2026.2
The full protocol, including how we handle a broker that changes its terms mid-test,
is published on the methodology page.
Section 04
What the 140 variables measure
Eight pillars, fixed weights, identical for every broker.
The eight scoring pillars, their fixed weights, the number of variables each
contains and the evidence each is scored from.
Pillar
Weight
Variables
What it measures
Evidence behind the score
Fees & Costs
30%
26
Observed EUR/USD and major-pair spreads, commission per lot, swap rates, inactivity and conversion fees.
Spread samples taken through London and New York sessions on a funded account.
Three named analysts. Every review carries the name of the person who ran it.
JC
James Cole
Head of Broker Testing
Designs the testing protocol and runs the execution and slippage work. Has personally opened, funded and emptied more than forty live trading accounts since 2019.
10reviews in this edition
42live accounts opened
Ex-execution analyst, London brokerage
PN
Priya Nair
Regulation & Safety Lead
Verifies every licence against the issuing regulator's public register and writes the trust and safety assessment. Nothing publishes until her fact-check is signed off.
10reviews in this edition
16live accounts opened
Compliance, EU investment firms
MR
Marco Rossi
Markets & Platforms Analyst
Stress-tests platforms and pricing, runs the spread sampling schedule, and compares tooling across MT4, MT5, cTrader and proprietary web terminals.
10reviews in this edition
27live accounts opened
Former proprietary FX trader
Editorial accountability: scores are set before any commercial conversation takes place,
every regulatory claim is verified against the issuing authority's public register, and
each review is re-tested and re-dated every ninety days. Full analyst profiles →
Risk warning: CFDs are complex instruments with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to
leverage. Between 74% and 89% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with
the providers covered on this page.
