Broker diligence

An ECN broker is a forex or CFD broker that uses an Electronic Communication Network to match a client's order directly against other market participants — banks, hedge funds, other traders, and liquidity providers — in…

Forex Peace Army (FPA) is an independent, community-driven review and forum website that rates forex brokers, signal services, expert advisors, and trading education. Founded in the mid-2000s, it functions as an industr…

A Market Maker is a broker that provides its own liquidity by taking the opposite side of a client's trade rather than routing the order to the open market. When a client buys, the market maker sells; when the client se…

Negative Balance Protection (NBP) is a broker safeguard that guarantees a retail trader's account balance cannot fall below zero. If extreme volatility or a price gap pushes a leveraged position past the client's equity…

A No Dealing Desk (NDD) broker passes your orders straight to external liquidity providers instead of filling them in-house. There is no dealer sitting between you and the market taking the opposite side of your trade o…

A proprietary trading firm (prop firm) gives skilled traders access to the firm's own capital to trade, instead of requiring them to risk their personal money. The trader typically pays for and passes an evaluation, the…

A regulated broker is a financial firm authorised and supervised by a recognised government or independent regulatory body, such as the UK's FCA, Australia's ASIC, or Cyprus's CySEC. The regulator enforces rules on mini…

A scam broker is an unregulated or deliberately deceitful operation that poses as a legitimate trading platform to steal traders' deposits. Rather than routing real orders, it manipulates the trading software, blocks wi…

A segregated account is a bank account in which a broker holds client deposits entirely separate from its own corporate operating funds. Client money is ring-fenced, so it cannot legally be used to cover the broker's pa…

Spread betting is a leveraged derivative product, offered mainly to UK and Ireland residents, in which you stake an amount of money per point of price movement in an instrument without owning it. Your profit or loss is …

Straight Through Processing (STP) is a No Dealing Desk execution model in which a broker passes client orders automatically to external liquidity providers — banks, non-bank market makers, and other funds — without a de…

Trustpilot is an open, global consumer-review platform where customers rate companies from one to five stars and leave written feedback. For retail brokers and prop firms it has become a default reputation check, becaus…

A turnkey brokerage is a pre-assembled, ready-to-launch package that lets an entrepreneur operate their own forex or CFD brokerage without building the technology stack from scratch. A technology vendor bundles the trad…

A White Label (WL) partnership lets one company rebrand an existing broker's trading platform and infrastructure as its own. The partner runs sales, marketing, and client acquisition under its own brand and logo, while …

A White Label Provider (WLP) is the established broker or technology firm that supplies the infrastructure, trading platforms, and liquidity another company uses to run a branded brokerage. The provider hosts the server…