Website Moved to a New Server

We have moved the BestOnlineForexBrokers.com website to new larger, faster server. Unfortunately they were some glitches during the process and the site was down the evening of January 22nd and the morning of January 23rd. We apologize for any inconvenience but we expect the move to be a benefit to us and our website visitors in the long term.

Initial Online Forex Broker Ratings Posted

I'm proud to announce that we have published our initial online forex broker ratings which covers 118 online forex brokers. The entire list can be found at Top Rated Online Forex Brokers. Here is the current top 20 -

1. aleccohFx (aFx)
2. Dukascopy Swiss FX
3. ABN AMRO Marketindex
4. EFX Group (EFX)
5. Delta Stock
6. HotSpot Fx
7. FINEX Group
8. Windsor Brokers, Ltd.
9. MB Trading
10. FCMarket
11. AvailTradingCorp. (ATC Brokers)
12. Questrade Inc.
13. Alpari IDC
14. MG Financial Group (MG Forex)
15. FxPrice LLC
16. Forex Capital Trading (ForexCT)
17. Swiss International
18. LiteForex
19. eToro
20. My Private Trade

How did we come up with these ratings? Well, here is the methodology that was used.

1. We collected ratings anywhere on the Internet we could find where we could be reasonably confident that actual individual traders were giving their own ratings. In other words, no pure marketing sites that pretend to be independent reviews. Right now, we are using about a dozen sites for this purpose.

2. Since the different sites used different number ranges for rating purposes, the numbers for each site were converted to a ratings scale of 1 to 10.

3. The numbers for each site were then adjusted so the median for each site was 5, so as no one site would be given more or less weight. They do, of course, receive more weight for the number of ratings posted.

4. Then a margin of error was applied to each online forex brokers' ratings, adjusted to the median of 5. The result of this is that those brokers with a large number of ratings have a very small adjustment but those with a small number of ratings may get a large adjustment and generally end up a bit above or below 5.

There you have it. Are we happy with out initial ratings? Well, no not really and we will refine our methodology as we go on. One thing I am toying with is to combine these ratings with the popularity ratings, giving half weight to the individual trader ratings and half to popularity, which is a combination of website traffic and the number of individual trader ratings.

Initially I was hesitant to put much stock in popularity because I know popularity can come as much from a good marketing program as it can from providing good services. However, after thinking about it, people who have an account with an online forex brokerage are voting for that broker in perhaps the most important way, with their wallet. Also, the main thing I am unhappy with in our initial ratings is I think perhaps, even with the margin of error adjustment, that some small brokers have been overrated.

Following is the top 20 when using this new proposed methodology. We probably will post both rating systems on the web site and let our visitors choose which one to use, or perhaps use both.

1. Dukascopy Swiss FX
2. MB Trading
3. Oanda
4. Interactive Brokers UK
5. EFX Group (EFX)
6. MG Financial Group (MG Forex)
7. aleccoFx
8. Delta Stock
9. Alpari IDC
10. Questrade Inc.
11. Global Forex Trading (GFT Forex)
12. LiteForex
13. Marketiva
14. TradeStation Securities
15. FINEX Group
16. FX Solutions
17. HotSpot Fx
18. Capital Market Services (CMS Forex)
19. Interbank FX
20. Windsor Brokers, Ltd.

I do think that this is probably more representative of the top brokers out their in the real world of forex trading. An online forex broker has to be both popular and have good ratings to make this list.

I would love to hear from anyone out there who has an opinion on either our ratings or our methodology. Look forward to hearing from you!

233 Online Forex Brokers and Counting!

We have completed the first part of the project which was to identify as many online forex brokers as we possibly could. As the title states, we have found 233 so far. I am sure we will find a few more but they will be small brokers as of course are many of the 233 we have found so far.

We began with the idea of profiling the top 150 online forex brokers and I think we are going to stick with that number. For the current list of the top 150, go to Top 150 Online Forex Brokers.

This list will change somewhat shortly as we have decided to change the methodology a little bit. Currently the popularity rankings are based upon the average web site ranking from Alexa, Compete and Quantum. We are going to change it so the web site ranking only accounts for one half of the popularity ranking and the other half will be the number of individual forex trader ratings that have been posted about the broker Internet wide. We believe that will give us a more realistic rating of popularity to include some measure of how many individual traders have actually used a particular forex broker.

Next up, initial ratings of approximately 125 online forex brokers based upon individual traders' reviews from many Internet sources. I think many people within the industry will be very surprised by some of the results. Stay tuned!

New Forex Broker Web Site

As stated in the description of this blog, I am the founder and creator of www.BestOnlineForexBrokers.com. The web site is not yet complete but I will post to this blog the progress of it and any information I think might be useful to those of you interested in the project.

This is quite a massive undertaking to collect all pertinent information, reviews, ratings, etc. on over 150 online forex brokers and I am sure we will find some interesting information during the course of our research, which I will post here.