Why we only list two brokers

The incentive problem with forty logos

Broker review sites and rebate portals monetize breadth. Every additional logo is an additional affiliate agreement, and the "rating" next to each broker has a way of tracking the payout behind it. When a site lists everyone, the list stops carrying information — it tells you who pays commissions, which is all of them.

We got out of that trap by inverting the direction: Forexnese is the IB group we trade under ourselves, and the site lists only the deals we negotiated for our own accounts. The catalog is small because our trading is the filter — not because we could not sign more agreements. Signing more agreements is easy. That is the problem with it.

The four tests — any single no is a veto

Before a broker or VPS provider goes on this site, the deal has to pass four tests we can verify with our own money:

1. The discount applies at the source. The provider bills less — $5.50 instead of $7.00 per lot, 15–20% off an invoice. No payout-later cashback, no balance accruing on a portal. Why this matters is worked through in how forex rebates work.
2. It is permanent. For the life of the account or subscription — not a first-90-days promo that quietly reverts to full price after you have moved your trading over.
3. Spreads and execution are untouched. The discount must come out of the provider's margin, never out of a widened spread or degraded fill. We compare live spreads on our own IB-linked accounts against the broker's published raw spreads to confirm it.
4. The numbers are verifiable and exact. We publish $5.50, not "up to 25% off". If we cannot see the exact rate on our own trade confirmations, we cannot print it — so we do not list it.

There is a fifth, unwritten test that precedes the other four: it has to be a product we would choose with no commission attached. We run our own EAs on these accounts and these servers. That is the whole qualification.

What the tests have already vetoed

The four tests are not decorative — each one exists because it filters out a deal shape we have actually been offered:

• Brokers that pay IBs more than our partners do. The easiest revenue we have ever said no to. A listing that exists because it pays more is the exact thing this site was built against.
• Cashback-only programs — where the broker will not discount at the source and the "deal" is a payout promise routed through a middleman.
• Promo-window discounts that expire after the first months, counting on you not to re-check your commission line.
• Spread-funded IB deals — a rebate on one line of your statement, paid for by a markup on another.
• Numbers we could not verify — "up to" rates that depend on volume tiers no retail trader reaches.

How we get paid, exactly

The broker shares part of the commission with us as the introducing broker. When you trade a lot at IC Markets, you are billed $5.50 and Forexnese receives a share of that from the broker's side. Trading without an IB, you would be billed $7.00 — and the broker would keep all of it. Our income costs you nothing; it replaces margin the broker was keeping anyway, after the broker has already cut your price by $1.50.

That is the entire business model. There are no listing fees, no paid placement, and no premium tiers — a paid slot would reverse the incentive that makes the short list mean something.

What would make it three

The list is short, not closed. A third broker gets added the day one clears the bar: we open an account with our own money, run our EAs on it for long enough to trust what we see, the discount lands at source and forever, and the spreads match the public raw pricing tick for tick. The bar is published in full on the partners page, where providers can also see what the first email should contain.

Until then, the honest inventory is: IC Markets at $5.50 per lot, Pepperstone Razor at $6.00 per lot, and two VPS providers at 15% and 20% off, forever. Four deals we would take ourselves — because we did.