How OnlineBroker.ae makes money

Our affiliate model

When you click through to a broker and open an account, we may receive a commission from that broker. That revenue funds our research and the running of the site, and it is why we can keep it free for readers. We only ever earn if you choose to open an account, and never from you: the commission is paid by the broker, not added to your costs.

The commercial footprint is narrower than that description usually implies, so it is worth stating plainly. We maintain an affiliate registry covering nine brokers, one entry for every broker we hold an affiliate relationship with. When that registry was last read, on 30 September 2026, exactly one of them had an active link: eToro. The other eight were paused, which means their buttons resolve to the broker’s own website and earn us nothing at all: Interactive Brokers, Pepperstone, AvaTrade, XTB, XM, Capital.com, Sarwa and Amana. Most of the brokers reviewed on this site currently generate no revenue for us.

What does not influence our ratings

Commission rates, partnership status and any commercial discussion have no effect on a broker’s score or review conclusions. The same fixed methodology is applied to every broker, partner or not, and non-partner brokers can and do outrank partners in our comparisons.

The overall score is derived from the ten category scores rather than entered by hand, so there is no field in which a rating could quietly be adjusted for a partner. A broker cannot pay to score higher, to soften a criticism, or to be reviewed more favourably.

No broker currently holds a paid placement arrangement with this site, and neither placement nor ranking order is for sale. Where a ranking entry carries a Partner tag, that tag marks a commercial affiliate relationship, not a paid position and not a purchased place in a list. If a paid arrangement is ever taken, we will name it here rather than bury it, and it still will not affect the score, which is produced by the same criteria applied to every other broker.

What we do not accept payment for

To be unambiguous about the boundaries:

• We do not accept payment to publish, remove or alter a review or its conclusions.
• We do not let a broker approve or edit its own review before publication.
• We do not give partners advance influence over their score.
• We do not accept payment to publish inaccurate regulatory information, or to soften a criticism we believe is justified.
• We do not sell placement or ranking order, and we do not run an unlabelled commercial position: a commercial relationship inside a ranking is tagged.

How broker links work

You never pay more for using our links. The pricing is identical whether you reach a broker through us or go to the broker directly.

A live affiliate link is marked as sponsored (it carries rel=“sponsored nofollow noopener” and opens in a new tab), so it is transparent to you and to search engines. Because only one broker’s link is currently active, most outbound buttons on this site are not affiliate links at all: they are plain links to the broker’s own website.

An affiliate disclosure notice appears above every ranking and in the site footer, and a partner risk disclosure naming eToro, including the proportion of retail CFD accounts that lose money with that provider, renders on every page of the site.

How we protect editorial independence

Scoring follows a fixed methodology applied consistently across every broker, and editorial and commercial responsibilities are kept separate. In practice that separation has names: reviews are researched, tested and written by Giles Thomas, edited by Braden Chase, and independently fact-checked against primary sources by Tomislav Turčin, our fact-checker, who has been director of CSAD Consulting in Zagreb since 2013 and works in market analysis and forex and futures trading.

The person who writes a review is not the person who verifies it, and neither role answers to the commercial side. You can see the full process on our methodology page, including the measurements we have not yet made, and the people behind it on our experts page.