How we rate brokers
A rating is only useful if you can see what produced it. Ours weights five criteria, and licensing dominates deliberately: on an unsupervised counterparty, every other quality is contingent.
| Criterion | Weight | What we look at |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing and legal entity | 35% | Which entity holds client funds, which regulator supervises it, and whether the licence actually covers binary options rather than a different product from the same group. |
| Withdrawal record | 25% | Documented complaint patterns, processing times, and whether refusals cluster around bonus terms or documentation demands. |
| Regulator actions | 20% | Fines, settlements, stop orders, alert-list entries and warnings, with dates and sources. |
| Cost and payout structure | 10% | Payout percentage against the implied break-even win rate, plus fees on funding and withdrawal. |
| Platform and support | 10% | Execution reliability, pricing transparency and whether support is a service desk or a retention desk. |
Disqualifying conditions
These override the score entirely — no weighting, no partial credit:
- The operator is named on the alert list of the regulator in the market a page targets.
- The operator solicits residents of a jurisdiction where the product is prohibited.
- Client funds are not segregated, or the client agreement does not identify the contracting entity.
- There is a documented pattern of refused withdrawals without a stated contractual basis.
What we do not do
We do not publish aggregateRating structured data for
unlicensed offshore providers. Marking up a machine-readable endorsement of
an unsupervised financial counterparty is not something a rating methodology
can justify, however transparent the methodology is.
We also do not rank by commission. Where a higher-paying and a better-licensed provider conflict, the licence wins, and the page says so. The clearest example is on every market page: Deriv ranks above IQ Option, although IQ Option is the only provider we currently have an affiliate agreement with and Deriv pays us nothing.
Why licensing dominates the weighting
On a supervised counterparty, a poor platform is an inconvenience. On an unsupervised one, it is the whole risk. If a withdrawal is refused by a broker with no licence, there is no complaints procedure, no ombudsman, no compensation scheme and no authority that can compel payment — the position is commercially identical to having no contract at all. Every other criterion in the table is conditional on that one, which is why it carries 35% rather than an equal fifth.
We score the entity, not the brand. Groups routinely operate a licensed company for CFDs and an unlicensed offshore company for binary options; a licence quoted in a footer tells you nothing about which company appears on your client agreement. Each review names both.
How the score is produced
Each criterion is scored out of ten, then weighted and summed. The published figure is derived arithmetically from the sub-scores — it is not set first and justified afterwards, which is the usual failure mode of broker ratings. Every review page shows the sub-scores and the weighted total, so the number can be checked.
When a rating changes
Ratings move when the facts move: a licence granted or returned, a regulator action, a documented change in withdrawal behaviour, or a change in which entity holds client funds. They do not move because a commercial arrangement changed. IQ Option's score fell when the CySEC licence was returned, not when anything about the platform changed.