Advertising & affiliate disclosure

Why this page exists

Prop firms, brokers, data vendors and course sellers pay affiliate commissions, and much of what is published about them online is written to earn those commissions rather than to be accurate. We say on our homepage that we are publisher-independent. This page is what that claim means in practice, so you can hold us to it.

What we do not do

• We do not take payment for a ranking or a score. No firm can pay to be rated higher, to appear in a comparison table, or to have a negative finding removed.
• We do not accept paid reviews. If a company offers to pay for coverage, the answer is no, and the offer itself may end up in the review.
• We do not let advertisers see reviews before publication or give them approval over wording.
• We are not a prop firm and we do not run a signals group, so we are not reviewing competitors or selling you an alternative.

How we may make money

Counting Ticks is currently free to read and carries no advertising. Where that changes, it will only be in the following ways, and always labelled.

• Affiliate links. Some outbound links to firms or tools may earn us a commission if you sign up. This never costs you more, and it never changes a score. Any page containing such a link will say so on that page, above the content, not buried here.
• Sponsorship. A sponsored article, episode or placement will be marked "Sponsored" clearly and prominently, and sponsors get no say over editorial content elsewhere on the site.
• Reader support or paid tiers. If we introduce these, editorial standards stay identical for free and paid readers.

How scores are decided

Firms are graded against a fixed, published rubric with fixed weightings — payouts and economics, rule fairness, trader outcomes, platform and execution, support and trust. The rubric is applied the same way to every firm regardless of any commercial relationship, and we publish the breakdown, not just the headline number, so you can re-weight it for what matters to you. See our methodology.

Our own positions

The people who write for this site trade their own money and may hold funded accounts with firms we review. Where a review covers a firm we personally trade with, we say so in the review. We do not trade on the basis of anything we are about to publish, because we do not publish market calls — we publish method.

Holding us to it

If you find a page where a commercial relationship is not disclosed, or where you think a score does not match the evidence, tell us at contact@countingticks.com. We will correct it and say what changed.