This page documents exactly how broker reviews and broker comparisons on Financial Expert Class are produced: what I score, how much each criterion weighs, where the numbers come from, which brokers I have actually used with my own money, and what happens when a broker pays a referral commission. If a broker review on this site ever contradicts this page, the review is wrong and this page wins — tell me and I will fix it and log it on the corrections page.
Who does this
One person: me, Kestutis Balciunas. I am a European retail investor with 11+ years of self-directed UCITS ETF and dividend investing, not a regulated financial adviser, and there is no panel of reviewers behind the ratings. Every judgement call on this page is mine, which is exactly why the process is written down — so you can audit it instead of trusting it.
The criteria and weights
Every broker review scores the same six things. The weights reflect what actually moves long-term outcomes for a European DCA investor — costs and safety dominate; interface polish does not.
| Criterion | Weight | What I actually check |
|---|---|---|
| Total cost of ownership | 30% | Commission per ETF trade, FX conversion fee, custody/platform fee, deposit and withdrawal costs — modelled for a monthly-DCA investor, not a day trader. The same maths that drives the EU broker fee comparator. |
| Regulation & investor protection | 25% | Which regulator authorises the entity you actually contract with (checked against the regulator’s own register, not the broker’s marketing page), and which investor-compensation scheme applies (ICF, EdW, FSCS…) with its cap. |
| Market & product access | 15% | UCITS ETF range, exchanges reachable, fractional/savings-plan support, whether the funds I actually recommend (VWCE, IWDA, VUAA class) are buyable. |
| Usability & account mechanics | 15% | KYC speed, funding methods, order types, how dividends are credited, statement quality — judged from a real user’s seat where I hold an account. |
| Tax reporting help | 10% | Does the broker withhold and report for your residency, or leave you to self-file? Annual tax report quality for the countries I cover. |
| Track record & transparency | 5% | Fee-schedule clarity, history of silent fee changes, regulator sanctions on public record. |
A broker is disqualified from recommendation entirely — regardless of score — if it is not authorised by an EU/EEA or UK regulator, if retail client assets are not segregated, or if I cannot verify its compensation-scheme membership from a primary source.
Test-account policy: what I have actually used
Honesty matters more here than anywhere else, so this is the exact split. I hold (or have held) personally funded live accounts at five brokers: Interactive Brokers (opened 2018), XTB (2020), Nexo (2021), Freedom24 (2022) and Trade Republic (2022). For those, reviews draw on my own KYC, deposits, real ETF orders, dividend credits and SEPA withdrawals, with redacted screenshots where useful.
Everything else — for example DeGiro, Trading 212, Saxo, Scalable Capital, Lightyear and eToro — is covered as desk research: published fee schedules, regulator registers, terms of service and the broker’s own documentation. Desk-research coverage is legitimate, but it is a different kind of knowledge, and the article will say plainly which kind you are reading. If a review does not name a first-hand account, assume desk research.
Data sources
- Broker pricing and terms pages — the fee schedule in force on the day the article is written or re-verified, always with an “as of” date.
- Regulator registers — ESMA, BaFin, CySEC, KNF, FCA, Bank of Lithuania — to confirm authorisation of the exact legal entity.
- Investor-compensation and deposit-guarantee scheme pages for the applicable protection caps.
- Company registers (e.g. Companies House) where corporate structure matters.
- justETF and issuer documents for checking which UCITS ETFs are actually tradable where.
Data cut-off and update cadence
Every fee table and comparison states the date its figures were pulled — for example, the current broker fee dataset reflects published schedules as of 4 June 2026. Broker fees change without notice, so a dated figure is a fact and an undated figure is a rumour.
Country deep-dive: the Norway broker comparison.
I do not promise a fixed review calendar I cannot keep. What I promise instead: a visible Reviewed date appears on an article only when a re-verification actually happened and was logged — the mechanics are on the editorial process page. Material fee changes at the five brokers where I hold accounts get corrected as I encounter them, and every material correction lands on the public corrections log.
Conflict of interest
Ten companies pay Aurum Digital Marketing Ltd a referral commission when a reader opens an account through a tracked link: seven brokers (Freedom24, Interactive Brokers, XTB, Trade Republic, Saxo, Scalable Capital and eToro), the crypto platform Nexo, and two services that are not brokers (Wise and Snowball Analytics). Every other broker on this site, including Trading 212, DEGIRO and Lightyear, is linked without any referral parameter. The list is kept current on the affiliate disclosure page (last reviewed 7 October 2026). That relationship never changes a score, a rank, or a warning: the fee comparator sorts purely by computed cost, and non-affiliated brokers regularly beat affiliated ones in it. The full mechanics are in the affiliate disclosure. There are no paid placements and no pay-to-rank arrangements.
What this methodology cannot do
It cannot tell you which broker is right for your tax residency, income and habits — that depends on facts about you that I do not have. It scores brokers for the investor profile this site serves: a European retail investor making regular UCITS ETF purchases for the long term. If you trade options daily, the weights above are wrong for you, and you should read them accordingly.