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Methodology and editorial policy

How the data on this site is produced, what is measured, what is restated from a source, and where the commercial relationships are.

Broker data

• Every broker fact — pricing, regulation, minimum deposit, platform list, extended-hours availability — is restated from the broker's own published pages, which are linked on each profile.
• Where a broker does not publish a figure, the field reads "not published". We do not fill it with an estimate, a competitor's number, or a figure from a third-party review site.
• Licence numbers are recorded as published by the broker; the entity that holds your account depends on your country of residence and determines your actual protections.
• We currently cover 16 brokers.

The star score

The star score next to each broker is an editorial score, not a user rating — this site does not collect reviews. It starts at 3.0 and adds fixed increments for verifiable facts already on the broker's profile: up to +1.0 for regulator count (0.25 per regulator, capped at four), +0.5 for real share ownership, +0.25 for fractional-share support, +0.25 for a minimum deposit at or under $50, and up to +0.25 for platform breadth. The formula is fixed and applies identically to every broker on the site — it cannot be adjusted per broker.

Stock screens

• Screens are reproducible filters over a stated universe of 163 US exchange-listed companies. The filter is named on every screen page.
• Sector, index membership and theme tags are our classification, applied consistently. They are editorial judgements, not vendor data.
• The penny-stock screen is defined by measured price below $5, taken from the daily price feed. When no price has been loaded, the page says so rather than implying a measurement we do not have.
• We cover exchange-listed securities only. Over-the-counter and pink-sheet tickers are outside the universe entirely — that is where most penny-stock fraud occurs.
• 67 screens and 16 broker lists are generated from these datasets.

Price and market data

• Prices are end-of-day, delayed, and shown with the trading date and source attached. They are for orientation, not for trading.
• Every price-dependent surface degrades to an explicit "not loaded" state rather than showing a stale or invented number.
• Market briefs cite their sources by link. Where a brief makes a claim we could not source, the claim does not run.

Editorial independence

• A broker's position in any table ordered on measured or published criteria is set by that criteria — never by anything else.
• No broker has editorial review, approval, or advance sight of anything published here before it goes live.
• The star score on every broker profile uses one fixed formula, published above, applied identically to every broker with no manual override.

What we do not do

• We do not give investment advice, price targets, buy/sell ratings or portfolio recommendations. A screen is not a recommendation.
• We do not publish performance claims, signal results or backtests.
• We do not cover over-the-counter securities, and we do not promote any individual small-cap stock.
• We do not remove a risk disclosure to make a commercial page convert better.

Corrections

If a figure on this site is wrong, it gets corrected at the source dataset so every page carrying it updates at once. Broker pricing changes frequently — the broker's own linked page is always the authority over ours.

Languages

Navigation, legal disclosures and the homepage are published in English plus 5languages (العربية, Español, 中文, Deutsch, हिन्दी). Broker, stock and country pages are English-canonical for now: tickers, prices and regulator names do not change across languages, and we would rather ship those pages correctly in one language than machine-translate financial and tax specifics we have not had natively reviewed. That coverage expands as pages get real translation review, not bulk auto-translation.

Coverage

16 brokers · 163 US-listed companies · 34 country guides · 67 stock screens · 16 broker lists · 6 languages.

Reviewed August 2026.