Research Methodology

Principle: only checkable evidence

A criterion is scored only where public, dated evidence exists. Marketing adjectives are not evidence. Where documentation is absent, the absence itself is recorded as an open question rather than being scored generously or punitively by assumption.

The ten criteria

• Regulatory disclosure — clarity about which entity holds accounts and which authority supervises it.
• Cost transparency — completeness of the published fee schedule across spread, commission, financing, conversion and periodic charges.
• Order type coverage — availability of limit, stop, stop-limit, bracket and trailing structures with documented time-in-force behaviour.
• Charting and analysis — timeframe range, indicator set, drawing persistence and data quality.
• Mobile parity — how much of the desktop workflow survives on a phone.
• Educational material — whether it teaches market structure or merely the product.
• Support accessibility — channels, hours and published response expectations.
• Withdrawal policy clarity — stated methods, timelines, thresholds and fees.
• Onboarding experience — clarity of verification requirements and account staging.
• Documentation depth — how much can be learned before funding anything.

Weighting

Criteria are not equal. Cost transparency and regulatory disclosure carry the heaviest weights because they affect every user's outcome regardless of strategy. Interface polish carries the lightest. Weights are reviewed annually and any change is published with the revision date, together with recalculated historical scores where comparability matters.

Scoring scale

• 5 — fully documented, with worked examples and no material ambiguity.
• 4 — documented clearly, minor gaps that a careful reader can work around.
• 3 — present but under-documented; requires contacting support to resolve.
• 2 — significant gaps or inconsistencies between published sources.
• 1 — absent, or contradicted by other published material.

Review cycle

Platform assessments including the Firstrade24 review are revisited quarterly, and out of cycle whenever a material change appears in public documentation. Each revision is dated on the page.

Known limitations

This method measures documented capability and transparency. It cannot measure execution quality without published statistics, cannot measure real-world support performance at scale, and cannot assess suitability for an individual reader in a specific jurisdiction. Readers should treat our scores as a starting point for their own verification, never as a substitute for it.

Reader assessments

Where reader assessment counts are displayed, they aggregate structured feedback submitted by site visitors about their own documented experience. They are reported separately from our editorial score and are never used to adjust it.