Editorial principles
Four rules. They are operational, not aspirational. Every review is reviewed against them before it goes live. The framing is plain because the commitments are.
We pay for what we test.
Every platform reviewed in these pages is purchased at retail by Trader Alternatives. We do not accept review accounts. We do not accept free upgrades. We do not accept "extended trials" offered specifically to press. When a vendor offers, we decline and pay anyway. The cost of paying retail is part of the cost of producing this publication. It is not optional.
This sounds austere. It is the cheapest of our commitments to keep, because the alternative — accepting a vendor's hospitality and then writing about them — corrupts the work in ways the reader can never fully see.
We don't take affiliate fees.
No link in any Trader Alternatives review pays a commission to this publication. We do not run banner advertising. We do not accept "sponsorships" from companies we cover. We do not publish "sponsored reviews," "partner content," or anything similarly named.
This is the structural commitment that matters most. The dominant business model for trading-software coverage is the affiliate link. It is also the reason the same three platforms are ranked in the same order across forty different sites, regardless of merit. We removed that incentive from the inside.
We publish corrections in full.
When we are wrong — and over a long enough time horizon, we will be — the correction is logged in public at /about/corrections with the original error, the corrected version, and the date the change was made. We do not silently edit. We do not move on.
Significant rewrites are noted at the top of the article. Small corrections appear in the corrections log without editing the original silently. Readers who linked to a piece can see what changed and why.
The verdict is ours.
Vendors are not given pre-publication access to reviews. They are not given the right to dispute scores before publication. Where we have a view on a product, we publish it without seeking permission, and we accept the reputational cost when a vendor disagrees publicly.
Where the editorial team disagrees internally on a verdict, the byline editor's call stands and the internal disagreement is noted in the body of the piece. The reader is entitled to know when a review is contested even within the editorial team. That transparency is what an independent verdict is for.
"Read the platform before you trade on it. We do the reading."