Investing or trading requires not only deep knowledge, training and skills, experience and capital, even a talent. Moreover, it requires one more thing – cooperation with the reliable and trusty broker. Without an intermediary you can rely on, an ordinary investor will not be able to conclude any transactions with assets, currencies or shares on the exchange.
What is more important, financial security, the potential benefit of exchange activities, and the safety of the deposit depend on the choice of a broker.
How to choose a broker
There are several key criteria to look out for when choosing a brokerage company.
- Availability of licenses and permits for activities. Regulatory approvals in your country are needed as well.
- The size of commissions, spreads, swaps. Pay attention to conditions for depositing and withdrawing money, terms of cooperation, responsibility for risks.
- Type of trading terminal, software convenience, method and speed of order execution – are important factors too.
- Accounts where clients’ money is kept – is a significant factor for your financial safeness. If money is held in offshore accounts, this should alert you.
- Finally, you should pay attention to the broker’s reputation, clients’ feedback, and its rating.
Where to find up-to-date information
First, you may check the official websites of the brokers. On the official sites you can find the terms of cooperation and the necessary documents, certificates, licenses, permits. However, you should double-check any information. The presence of advertisements and promotional reviews is a disadvantage of this method.
Secondly, visit the thematic forums for traders, groups in social networks, check publications on media sites. However, an independent search for information and its filtering require a lot of time and effort.
Third, you can use independent sites that publish broker reviews and ratings. They also publish ads as well and that is why we recommend you to study several reviews and ratings you can find online.
Benefits of independent websites
Even considering the presence of possible advertising, you will find useful tools for evaluating a particular company on the pages of independent portals.
- Traders’ reviews. Due to the reviews, you can find out the subtleties of cooperation and the current conditions concerning a particular broker. If there are some complaints or negative comments about it then you will find out about it in advance, before making a deposit.
- Processional reviews. Typically, the review indicates important information about the company, term of the work, basic conditions, advantages and disadvantages. The example of such material is an Etoro review.
- Rating. Independent portals offer several types of ratings. Usually you can find the website’s rating and user-defined rating. You can also leave your vote for the selected broker if you want to.
- Black list. The black list includes companies that work dishonestly, with a low level of customer service. You can check the scammers and brokers to avoid in that list.
In conclusion, the advantage of independent portals is the ability to get information about brokers as well as to compare the terms of cooperation on the pages of one and the same site.
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