Reference
Market hours, exchange holidays and the numbers you need at hand.
An Australian licence lists products per activity, and CMC may advise on shares while only issuing derivatives
The ASIC authorisation text is structured by what the firm does, not by what it sells. Read as a flat list it says one thing; read by activity it says another. Five of eleven broker licences carry nothing but derivatives and foreign exchange.
Verified 9 September 2026
ATAS pricing: the annual discount is 20% on the cheap tier and 44% on the expensive one
Four tiers across four billing periods, all published. The lifetime licences pay back in three to four years at the annual rate, and the discount structure quietly pushes you upward.
Verified 27 August 2026
Bloomberg Terminal cost: about $2,665 a month for one seat, and a two-year minimum behind it
Bloomberg publishes no prices, so every figure is a third-party report and they disagree by a factor of thirty. The reported band is $24,000 to $32,000 a year for a single seat, with a two-year minimum and two documented price rises since 2023.
Verified 20 August 2026
Can a Cypriot broker take you if you live outside the EU? The register names the countries, and six of ten name none
CySEC publishes, per firm, which non-EU countries a licensed Cypriot broker may serve. Plus500CY lists 27. XTB lists 5. Six of the ten firms we checked list none at all, and the field sits one click from the licence number.
Verified 8 September 2026
Checking a broker on the regulator's register: four ways the check goes wrong
We ran the same register checks on fourteen brokers. The advice to look a firm up is right, and it fails in four specific ways that nobody warns you about. Each one has a worked example and a fix.
Verified 26 August 2026
CME holiday calendar 2026: every closure is a three-day window, and the reopen time depends on what you trade
The exchange does not publish holidays as single days. Memorial Day covers 24 to 26 May, Thanksgiving covers 26 to 28 November. After Thanksgiving, crypto reopens at 16:02 and grains do not reopen at all.
Verified 9 September 2026
Commodities broker: the phrase covers three different businesses, and only one puts you on an exchange
Search for a commodities broker and you get exchange futures firms, CFD shops and spot metal dealers on the same page. They are regulated differently, hold your money differently, and only the first one gives you a contract anybody else can see.
Verified 17 August 2026
CySEC publishes which website each broker may operate, and six of the ten we checked are not approved for their own .com
The Cypriot regulator lists an approved domain for every licensed firm. XTB's licence covers xtb.com/cy, Tickmill's covers tickmill.com/eu. The global brand domain most people land on is a different door, and often a different company.
Verified 8 September 2026
Day trading for beginners: the $25,000 rule everyone still quotes was removed in June
FINRA eliminated the pattern day trader designation and its minimum equity requirement on 4 June 2026. Almost every beginner guide still describes the old regime. Here is what replaced it.
Verified 10 August 2026
FinancialJuice and what a squawk actually is
A squawk is a live voice feed reading headlines the moment they cross the wire. FinancialJuice offers text and voice headlines free, with an Elite tier gating part of it. What matters is the delay you are removing and whether it is worth removing.
Verified 12 August 2026
Five firms closed, and their websites are still working: two still take signups, two still draw 13,800 searches a month
We documented five brokers and prop firms that shut down. What happened to client money ranged from a full refund on every account to a domain that now forwards to a competitor's signup page carrying the dead firm's affiliate tracking.
Verified 7 September 2026
Forex market hours: when each session opens and closes
The four sessions in UTC, why three of them move twice a year and Tokyo never does, and which overlap actually carries the volume.
Verified 5 August 2026
Futures Broker: What You're Signing Up For
A futures account is not a stock account with different tickers. Different regulator, different protection, and SIPC does not cover it. What to check before you fund one.
Verified 11 August 2026
Futures commission per contract: on a micro S&P at NinjaTrader's free plan, the commission is 41% of what you pay
Per-contract futures pricing from Interactive Brokers and NinjaTrader, read from each firm's own pages. The headline commission is the smaller part of a micro trade: exchange, NFA and clearing fees make up the rest, and they do not fall when you buy a cheaper plan.
Verified 16 September 2026
Futures day trading margin: $50 opens a micro S&P contract, and fifteen minutes before the close the requirement becomes $2,844.75
NinjaTrader's intraday margins, the exchange-based margins behind them and CME's contract specifications, read on 16 September 2026. The day margin is under 2% of the overnight one, it ends at 15:45 Central, and $50 on a micro S&P is a ten-point move.
Verified 16 September 2026
Futures trading hours: the session, the daily break, and the 2026 holiday closes
CME Globex runs nearly around the clock, but not quite. The daily maintenance window, the weekly boundary and the 2026 holiday schedule, taken from the exchange's own specifications.
Verified 9 September 2026
How much can you make day trading: the one large study that followed everybody found 1.1% above minimum wage
Most answers to this question come from people selling something. The largest published study tracked every individual who started day trading in a national futures market over three years, and the numbers it reports are not close to the ones in the adverts.
Verified 14 August 2026
How much it costs to trade options: $0.65 a contract is 0.7% of a $2 option and 26% of a five-cent one
Per-contract commissions at Interactive Brokers and Schwab, read from each firm's own pricing page, and the arithmetic that decides whether they matter. On one contract IBKR's order minimum makes it dearer; from two contracts the schedules match to the cent.
Verified 16 September 2026
IBKR Tiered vs Fixed: the published rates cannot decide it, and below 200 shares they are not the point
Fixed is all-inclusive at $0.005 a share, Tiered is $0.0035 plus pass-through fees nobody can quote in advance. What the published numbers do settle is that under 200 shares the minimum charge, not the rate, is what you pay.
Verified 1 September 2026
Institutional trading platform: what the word institutional is actually doing
Retail platforms and institutional platforms differ in who the counterparty is, how orders reach the market, and who carries the risk if something breaks. Most software marketed as institutional to individuals differs in none of those.
Verified 12 August 2026
Interactive Brokers pricing: the free tier is priced, and IBKR wrote down where
IBKR Lite charges zero commission on US stocks. IBKR's own order routing disclosure states what that costs instead, in one sentence that most comparisons never quote.
Verified 17 August 2026
Is forex trading halal? What the question turns on
The disagreement is not really about currency trading. It is about four specific mechanics of a retail account, and each one is written down in the broker's own documents.
Verified 8 August 2026
Leverage limits by regulator: why the same broker offers 30:1 here and 500:1 there
The caps in the EU, UK, Australia and the US — and what it means when a broker offers you far more than any of them allow.
Verified 5 August 2026
NinjaTrader fees: the $99 plan saves you nothing until 165 round turns a month
NinjaTrader sells three plans at $0, $99 a month and $1,499 once, each with its own commission rate. The rates are published per side, which means the cheapest plan depends entirely on how much you trade, and the crossover is further out than most people assume.
Verified 14 August 2026
Professional or non-professional: the status that decides your data bill, and how one platform makes it a 15× jump
Exchanges classify every data subscriber, and the classification turns on how you use the feed rather than how well you trade. On TradingView it moves the entry price from $12.95 to $199.95. On CME futures data it has a monthly condition most people never read.
Verified 7 September 2026
Quantower pricing: three of the six add-ons cost more than the entire platform
One licence at $70 a month, or pay per feature. The published add-on prices mean any trader wanting three of them is already better off buying everything, and the bundle sold as a saving is the worst value on the page.
Verified 28 August 2026
Searching ASIC for FP Markets or IC Markets returns nothing, and both hold Australian licences
We swept the full register of 6,525 Australian financial services licensees for the brokers we review. Two of the best-known brands are invisible to a search for their own name, one licence is wholesale-only, and one brand holds two licences that are not the same thing.
Verified 8 September 2026
Sierra Chart pricing: the two cheapest packages can't connect to a broker
Sierra Chart sells five monthly packages from $26 to $56. The two at the bottom of the list cannot connect to an external data or trading service at all, and that is the fact that decides which one you actually need.
Verified 12 August 2026
tastytrade fees: $1 an option to open, nothing to close, and above 50 contracts the clearing fee costs more than the commission
tastytrade's commission table and its full fee schedule, last updated 30 July 2026. The $10 cap per leg makes large option orders cheap in commission, but the $0.10 clearing fee is not capped. On futures it is dearer than NinjaTrader's free plan on micros and cheaper on the E-mini.
Verified 16 September 2026
The FCA register has a Requirements field: thirteen of fourteen brokers carry one, and only a single condition is about the firm itself
A requirement on a licence sounds alarming and usually is not. Eleven of the fourteen firms we swept carry the same industry-wide condition from November 2023. One carries a ring-fence naming two agreements by date, and two hold a permission to approve other companies' adverts.
Verified 9 September 2026
The pattern day trader rule is gone. The penalty that replaced it is set by each broker: three misses at E*TRADE, four at IBKR
FINRA removed the $25,000 minimum and the day-trade count on 4 June 2026. What replaced them is an intraday margin deficit, and six US brokers read on 16 September 2026 give it different deadlines, different strike counts and, in one case, two help pages that disagree.
Verified 16 September 2026
Three regulators, three different registers: what each one tells you, and the question none of them answers
We have now read the FCA, ASIC and CySEC registers field by field across the same set of brokers. Each publishes something the other two do not, and choosing which to open depends on what you are actually trying to find out.
Verified 9 September 2026
TradingView pricing: four tiers from $12.95, and professionals may only buy the $199.95 one
The published rates, the monthly prices derived from TradingView's own stated annual savings, and the rule at the bottom of the page that moves a professional user from the cheapest plan to the most expensive one.
Verified 27 August 2026
Tradovate pricing: the plan is an arithmetic problem, and the commissions are NinjaTrader's to the cent
Three plans, one platform. The break-even sits at 330 contract sides a month on standard futures and 1,980 on nano. The published schedule is identical to NinjaTrader's, which changes what the choice between them is actually about.
Verified 28 August 2026