Broker Risk Analyzer

The 0 to 100 score is the CLEAR™ composite, a weighted average of five sub-scores. Compliance carries 40 percent of the weight, because regulator standing is by far the strongest empirical predictor of broker failure or withdrawal denial in the following 24 months. Accountability carries 20 percent, weighting transparency on ownership, audit history and legal-agreement readability. Reliability carries 20 percent, weighting operating tenure, executive stability and prior-enterprise rebrand check. Liquidity and Experience each carry 10 percent, because they tend to be lagging indicators (withdrawal queues lengthen and complaint volume spikes only after the stress event begins). Inside Compliance, the four regulator tiers are weighted asymmetrically: a Tier 1 licence contributes roughly ten times the weight of a Tier 4 licence, a Tier 2 contributes four times the weight of a Tier 4. A broker with three Tier 1 licences and a clean public record caps near 90. A broker with only Tier 4 licences and one or more recent regulator warnings caps in the bottom quartile. The analyzer prints the composite alongside the five sub-scores so you can see exactly which factor is dragging the headline.

Tier 1 is the analyzer’s label for regulators that enforce the full developed-market protection stack: capital adequacy at investment-bank levels, mandatory segregation of client funds in trust accounts, a meaningful compensation scheme that pays out on insolvency, retail leverage caps (typically 30:1 on majors and lower on volatile pairs), mandatory negative-balance protection, a deep conduct-of-business rulebook, and an enforcement record of actually revoking licences when brokers misbehave. The Tier 1 list inside the analyzer is FCA (United Kingdom), ASIC (Australia), CFTC plus NFA (United States), FINMA (Switzerland), BaFin (Germany), MAS (Singapore), JFSA (Japan retail derivatives), and IIROC (Canada). A broker holding any one Tier 1 licence is in a materially safer category than a broker holding only Tier 2 or below. A broker holding three Tier 1 licences across different jurisdictions is in the safest category, because it has to satisfy three separate developed-market regulators simultaneously to keep operating. Note that some Tier 1 regulators (CFTC, NFA, FINRA) only license US-resident customers; if you are not a US resident, those licences exist on paper but do not protect you.

Offshore is not synonymous with risky, but it carries materially weaker protection than onshore Tier 1 licensing, and the analyzer reflects that. A Tier 3 licence from FSC Mauritius or VFSC Vanuatu typically means the broker is registered, has minimal capital and conduct requirements, and does not run a compensation scheme. Some offshore brokers operate normally for years and honour every withdrawal. Others use the offshore licence as a regulatory arbitrage tool to offer 500:1 leverage to non-resident customers who would otherwise be capped at 30:1 onshore. The empirical question is: in a stress event, does the offshore licence give you any meaningful recourse? Usually the answer is no. There is no compensation scheme to recover from, the segregation requirements are weak or unenforced, and the regulator has historically revoked very few licences. The analyzer therefore weights offshore licences at roughly a tenth of a Tier 1 licence in the CLEAR composite, and prints the licence colour-coded amber or pink. Many traders open offshore accounts deliberately to access higher leverage, which is a personal choice. Just do it with eyes open on the protection trade-off, and never deposit more than you can afford to lose entirely.

The analyzer prints segregation status in the Client Protections panel as a green or red tick. The underlying check pulls the broker’s audited regulatory filings (FCA CASS reports for UK entities, ASIC client-money disclosures for Australian entities, CySEC client-money compliance reports for Cyprus entities) and the broker’s own segregation language in the legal agreement. A green tick means three things are simultaneously true: the broker holds client money in a designated trust account at a separately-licensed credit institution, the broker is subject to the segregation rules of a Tier 1 or Tier 2 regulator that enforces them, and the broker discloses the trust bank by name in its filings. If any of those three is missing, the analyzer marks the segregation as Partial (amber) or None (red). The reason it matters: in a broker insolvency, segregated funds are recoverable through the administrator and the compensation scheme. Non-segregated client money is the broker’s working capital, gets pulled into the bankruptcy estate, and is usually lost. Several offshore brokers have a marketing line about segregation that is not backed by any actual trust arrangement; the analyzer catches this by requiring the trust bank to be named.

CLEAR is the analyzer’s 5-factor scoring framework. The acronym stands for Compliance, Liquidity, Experience, Accountability, Reliability. Each letter is a 0 to 100 sub-score that measures one specific dimension of broker safety. Compliance measures regulator standing: how many Tier 1 licences, what enforcement history. Liquidity measures operational depth: order-book depth on flagship products, withdrawal queue performance, named prime brokers. Experience measures customer-experience signal: complaint volume, dispute outcomes, recurring patterns across regulator databases. Accountability measures transparency: audit history, beneficial-owner disclosure, legal-agreement readability, entity-tree clarity. Reliability measures track record: years in operation, executive stability, prior-enterprise rebrand check, prior stress-event handling. The five sub-scores feed a weighted composite (40-10-10-20-20) that produces the headline 0 to 100 CLEAR Score. Score bands: 80+ Excellent, 60 to 79 Acceptable, 40 to 59 Caution, below 40 Walk Away. The framework is designed to be tier-aware (Tier 1 licences dominate Compliance), pattern-aware (multiple flags from different regulators amplify rather than average), and time-decay-aware (a flag from six years ago weighs much less than a flag from six months ago).

Most of them, no. The economics of broker-review SEO almost guarantee a conflict of interest. The typical broker affiliate pays 200 to 800 USD per funded account, with revenue-share continuing for the lifetime of the customer. A review site that ranks brokers honestly by CLEAR™ score would push readers toward Tier 1 brokers, where affiliate payouts are usually lower because the brokers compete on regulation rather than commission. The same review site ranks brokers by paid placement would push readers toward Tier 4 offshore brokers, where commission is highest because customer lifetime is shortest. The pattern is visible in almost every “Best Forex Brokers 2025” list on the open web: the top three results are usually CySEC-only or offshore brokers, never the multi-Tier-1 names. The analyzer breaks this loop by pulling regulator-register data directly and never taking affiliate money. If you want a sanity check on any open-web review, paste the broker name into the analyzer and compare the CLEAR score against the review site’s stars. Disparity is the warning sign.

It depends on the regulator and the action type, and the analyzer prints all of them with their exact label. The mildest action is a Section 165 information request (FCA) or equivalent, which is the regulator asking the broker to explain something specific. The next escalation is a public warning, where the regulator publishes a notice that the broker is operating outside its permissions or marketing misleadingly. The next is a financial penalty, which is a fine attached to a specific breach. The next is a restriction on permissions, which limits what products the broker can offer or what customers it can take. The most serious is a licence revocation, where the broker is no longer permitted to operate at all. Each step up the ladder is a stronger signal that the broker is closer to a stress event. Empirically, brokers that accumulate three or more public warnings or penalties in 24 months fail within 12 months roughly half the time. The analyzer puts every action on the Red Flags timeline with a date and action type, so you can read the escalation pattern directly. A single warning from five years ago is forgivable. Three warnings in eighteen months from three different Tier 1 regulators is a critical signal.

The 700+ broker name list is curated and updated continuously as the industry consolidates, rebrands, and adds new prop-firm entrants. The CLEAR™ score itself is computed live on every analyze hit: the regulator registers are pulled in real time at the moment you click Analyze, the licence status comes back fresh from the FCA, ASIC, CFTC, NFA, FINMA, BaFin, MAS, JFSA, IIROC, CySEC and FSCA registers, the enforcement actions come back fresh from the public archives, and the AI synthesis runs against that live data. Nothing is cached longer than the session. If a licence was revoked yesterday, the analyzer prints the revocation today. If a broker added a new Tier 1 licence this morning, the analyzer prints it this afternoon. The reason this matters: most open-web broker-review sites publish a snapshot once a quarter and let it go stale, so they routinely recommend brokers whose licences have been revoked since the review was written. The analyzer cannot be stale because there is no static review behind it. Every analysis is a fresh pull.