How do you know a good broker from a bad one?
Back in the halcyon days of the early world wide web, if you wanted to find out if a product or service was any good, you didn’t have bucket loads of choice.
After trawling through some questionable forums and ‘web blogs’, any reviews you found were likely to be about as reliable as your dial-up connection. Most people still leaned heavily on traditional sources such as word of mouth and the seller’s advertising to make their choices.
Fast-forward a few years: with the rise of Web 2.0, ‘blind-buying’ needed qualification. Enter, eBay, Amazon, TripAdvisor, TrustPilot and a range of sites based on the model of ‘social proofing’ – getting you to rate products or services yourself quickly and easily. Five star ratings are simple to understand, so instead of taking the seller’s word for it you could now read reviews and see photos from actual users. Amazing. Suddenly we were able to utilise the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and felt more able to know what’s actually great and what’s just saying it is.
But what about your broker? How has the push towards a world of digital reviews made its way into the financial realm, where vendors – quite rightly – deserve heavier scrutiny than your average toothpaste brand? Well, in 2020 you really had only three options: general business review sites – filled with unverified and uninformed opinions of people with lots of different axes to grind – journalist reviews with no access to any internal company data, or your standard awards event, relying on a panel of ‘experts’, perhaps with their own agendas and favourites.
Which is why the Broker Awards – unveiled today by the social charting platform TradingView – is a noteworthy next step on from the old ways of sharing feedback. The rapidly growing platform has nearly 14.5 million registered traders and investors across the world, receives upwards of 140 million visits a month, and integrates with dozens of brokers internationally. Traders use its larger-than-life charts to complete technical and fundamental analysis, place trades directly from the platform via broker partners, as well as sharing their ‘Ideas’ with others on its social network.
The Broker Awards mark a novel new way of helping these traders and investors find the right brokerage for them. First, only genuine customers of the broker – verified through the TradingView integration – can leave reviews. Second, because of the breadth of integrations, they are perhaps the only platform on the planet that can actually accurately compare brokers – based on a range of usually non-disclosed factors like tech up-time, and contributions to the community through publishing of ideas and interactions with users.
This year’s award features eight categories, giving a rounded view of the industry:
- Broker of the Year
- Most Popular Broker
- Social champion
- Most Innovative Tech
- Best Multi-Asset Broker
- Best Futures Broker
- Best Forex and CFD Broker
- Best Crypto Broker or Exchange
As only brokers integrated with TradingView’s system were eligible for an award, this allows a fairer comparison with no outside influence or reliance on hearsay. You can find out the winners by visiting the TradingView website.
Such awards are a true expression of the new, increasingly democratic, nature of the trading world as it grows today. As the everyday retail investor gains more access to the right tools, deeper education and a larger network through which to share their market ideas and thoughts, their voice will only grow louder. And with it, their opinions on who helps them on their journey – and who hinders them – will carry ever greater weight.
See the winners of the TradingView Broker Awards 2020 and find out more about the world’s leading social charting platform at TradingView.com.