How We Check and Rank Brokers

The first check: can you actually use it

The first thing we check is whether a resident of the Philippines can open an account, fund it and withdraw from it. A broker that fails this is not ranked at all, however good its platform looks, because a gold position you cannot fund or cash out is not a product you can use.

In practice that means looking at whether GCash or bank transfer are accepted on the funding side, and whether a withdrawal route back to a Philippine account exists in the broker's own documents. We treat this as a pass-or-fail gate rather than a score, because there is no partial version of being able to get your money out.

Why the reference price and a broker quote will not match

The reference price near 4275.0 is an indicative anchor, not a live quote, so it will differ from what your platform shows the moment you look. A broker quote is a two-sided price with a spread around it, moving continuously, and the side you get depends on whether you are buying or selling. The reference figure sits in the middle of nothing in particular; it exists so that worked examples such as the $85.50 margin on 0.10 lots stay reproducible instead of drifting every time the page loads.

Timing explains most of the rest of the gap. A snapshot taken at one moment and a quote streamed to your terminal are different observations of the same market, and gold moves in the interval between them. Session matters too: liquidity and the width of the quote change across the trading day, so the same reference price can sit further from the tradable price at a quiet hour than at an active one. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions.

The practical consequence is that you should never size a position off the reference price alone. Use your platform's live quote for entry, stop and target, and use the site's arithmetic to check that your sizing logic is right. If the two produce different margin figures, the difference is the price input, not the formula. Recalculate with the quote in front of you before you commit money, and treat the reference price as a teaching number that happens to be close to reality.

The figures this site refuses to publish, and the reason

Spreads, commissions, swaps and minimum deposits are deliberately absent as numbers. Each depends on the account type, the entity serving you, the instrument and the moment, and each changes without notice. Publishing a figure would create a reference point that readers would treat as a commitment and then measure their real account against. The site instead states what the cost consists of and what it depends on, which stays true across account types and across time in a way a single number cannot.

Live USD/PHP rates are also not published. The rate that matters is the one applied to your own conversion through GCash or your bank, including whatever margin that rail applies, and a published mid-market rate would flatter every peso figure on the site. Peso examples are therefore illustrative and marked as such. The same logic applies to any peso profit or loss illustration: it is arithmetic on a rate you supply, not a forecast of what you will receive.

Leverage is published only as a cap, never as a recommended setting. The cap that applies to the entity serving this country is a ceiling, not a target, and the site deliberately avoids presenting any ratio as the sensible choice. Trading at the maximum available leverage is a decision with consequences that no methodology page can make for you, and the worked margin figure of about $85.50 on 0.10 lots is there to show the arithmetic, not to suggest the position is appropriately sized.

The arithmetic behind every calculator, stated in words

Position size is worked out by dividing the money you are willing to risk by the money one pip costs on the size you are considering. On gold, pip value equals lots multiplied by 100 oz multiplied by 0.01, which simplifies to lots multiplied by one dollar. A 0.10-lot position therefore moves $0.10 per pip, and a 50-pip stop with a $20 risk budget implies a maximum size of 0.04 lots. The calculator never picks the risk budget for you; it only converts your inputs.

Margin is notional value divided by the leverage cap. Notional value is lots multiplied by 100 oz multiplied by the reference price, so 0.10 lots at 4275.0 is 10 oz times 4275.0, or $42,750. Dividing that by the applicable cap produces the roughly $85.50 figure used in the examples. The result is the amount held aside to keep the position open, not the most you can lose, and it moves as price moves because notional value moves with it.

Pip value in pesos is the dollar pip value multiplied by the USD/PHP rate you supply. The site does not publish an exchange rate, because the rate you actually get depends on your bank or e-wallet conversion at the moment of funding or withdrawal. Profit and loss in pesos follows the same path: price difference in pips, times pip value in dollars, times your conversion rate. Every calculator shows the intermediate numbers so a discrepancy can be traced to a single input rather than the whole result.

How to rebuild any number on this page yourself

Every figure here can be reconstructed from three inputs: the lot size, the reference price and the leverage cap. Start with pip value: lots multiplied by 100 oz multiplied by 0.01, which gives dollars per pip. For 0.10 lots that is $0.10. Then notional value: lots multiplied by 100 oz multiplied by the price. At 4275.0 that is $42,750. Divide by the applicable cap and you have the margin, roughly $85.50 in the worked example. Do it in that order and any discrepancy shows up immediately.

To check a risk calculation, decide your risk budget in dollars, divide it by the pip value, and you have your stop distance in pips. A $20 budget against $0.10 per pip allows 200 pips, which on gold is a $2.00 price move. Reverse the operation to check the site's output: stop distance in pips multiplied by pip value should return your budget exactly. If it does not, one of the three inputs differs from what you assumed, and the arithmetic will tell you which.

To convert anything to pesos, multiply the dollar result by the USD/PHP rate you actually obtain from GCash or your bank, and accept that the number will not match a mid-market figure. Keep your own record of the rate and the timestamp you used, because a peso result without its rate is not reproducible. If you repeat the calculation later and get a different answer, compare inputs first: lot size, price, cap and conversion rate account for every difference the method can produce.

The blind spots this method cannot close

The method cannot tell you what your account will actually charge. Spreads, commissions and swaps are account- and entity-specific and are not published here as numbers, so any cost comparison you build from this site is incomplete until you read the broker's own schedule for the account type you would open. The methodology measures position sizing, margin and pip value accurately; it does not measure your all-in cost of trading, and it should not be read as if it did.

The method also cannot model slippage, gaps or weekend risk on gold. Calculations assume your stop fills at the price you set, which is the assumption most likely to fail during news releases or the Monday reopen. Gold can gap through a stop, and a position sized to lose a fixed amount on paper can lose more. The risk budget in the calculator is a planning input, not a guarantee of maximum loss, and no formula on the site changes that.

Finally, the method is entity-blind on regulation. It records that FxPro is licensed by the FCA (UK) and CySEC and not by the SEC of the Philippines, and it stops there. It does not assess what recourse you would have in a dispute, how a complaint would travel, or how client money is held. Those are legal and operational questions that a calculator cannot answer, and the site does not pretend otherwise.

How a broker fact gets a date and a re-check schedule

Every broker fact carries the date it was last confirmed against the source, and that date is what you should read before trusting the detail. A fact is only as good as its confirmation date: the platform list, the funding methods available to Philippine clients, and the regulator wording are each stamped separately, because they change on different clocks. If a page shows no recent confirmation for a field, treat that field as unverified rather than automatically correct.

Re-checks are triggered by three things: a scheduled review, a visible change on the broker's own pages, and a reader report of a discrepancy. The regulator statement is the most conservative of the three to touch, because it is quoted verbatim and a paraphrase would be a factual error even if the meaning survived. Leverage is re-checked against the entity serving this country rather than against a headline number, since the cap that applies to you is the one attached to your entity.

The date is not decorative. If the broker changes its platform lineup or adds or removes a funding rail for the Philippines, the old sentence stays live only until the review catches it, which is why the stamp matters more than the prose. When you act on a broker detail from this site, confirm it inside your own account before funding, because your account view is always newer than any third-party page, including this one.

The limits of what we test

We do not test execution speed, slippage or platform stability on a live account, and we do not publish spreads, commissions, swaps or minimum deposits as numbers. Those depend on the account type, the entity, the market at the time and the method used to measure, so a single figure would mislead more than it informs.

We also do not audit a broker's finances or verify its client-money arrangements ourselves. What we can do is point you to the entity that serves the Philippines and to the regulator caveat that applies: FxPro is licensed by the FCA (UK) and CySEC - not by the SEC of the Philippines. Beyond that, the documents are the source, and you should read them at the date you sign up.

Where each class of figure on this site comes from

The reference price on every page is an indicative XAU/USD level near 4275.0, used as a fixed anchor so worked examples stay stable from visit to visit. It is a snapshot for illustration, not a quote you can trade against. Instrument facts are fixed by contract specification: gold trades as XAU/USD, one standard lot is 100 oz, and one pip is 0.01, so a one-pip move on a full lot is $1.00. Those three constants never change between pages because they describe the instrument, not the market.

Broker facts come from the broker itself: FxPro, the platforms it offers (MT4, MT5, cTrader and the FxPro app), the funding rails listed for Philippine clients (GCash and bank transfer), and the regulatory position. The regulator statement is reproduced exactly as given: FxPro is licensed by the FCA (UK) and CySEC, not by the SEC of the Philippines. Leverage is described only as the cap that applies to the entity serving this country, because the cap is an entity attribute, not a market price.

Margin figures are derived, not observed. The worked example of about $85.50 margin on a 0.10-lot gold position comes from applying the applicable leverage cap to the notional value of 10 oz at the reference price. Nothing on the site states a spread, commission, swap rate or minimum deposit as a number, because those are account-specific and broker-specific and would be stale the moment they were written. Where a cost is discussed, the page names what the cost consists of and what it depends on.

Which fields update on their own and which wait for a human

The reference price and every figure derived from it are refreshed automatically on a fixed schedule, so the worked examples, margin numbers and pip values stay internally consistent with one another. Instrument constants such as 100 oz per lot and 0.01 per pip are not refreshed at all; they are specification, not data. Anything that is a pure function of those two inputs, such as the $85.50 margin example, is recalculated rather than edited, which is why it should never disagree with the formula shown beside it.

Broker details are reviewed by hand. Platform availability, the funding methods listed for Philippine clients, and the regulator wording are checked against the source and only changed when the source changes. They are not scraped continuously, because a page that silently rewrites a licensing statement is worse than one that lags by a few days. Leverage is treated the same way: it is recorded as the cap for the entity serving this country and only revised when that cap is confirmed to have moved.

Currency conversion is left entirely to the reader. The site does not run a live USD/PHP feed, so peso figures in examples are illustrative conversions you are expected to replace with your own rate from GCash, your bank, or wherever you actually move money. This is deliberate: a published rate would look authoritative while being wrong for almost everyone reading it, since the spread and timing of a real conversion are personal to your transaction.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure we publish comes from the broker's own documents, and we record the date we read them. Contract specifications, leverage terms, margin requirements and entity details are taken from the broker's site and legal pages as published, not from memory, forums or third-party summaries.

When we show a worked figure, we show the arithmetic. For example, at the leverage cap that applies to the entity serving the Philippines, a 0.10-lot gold position needs about $85.50 margin, because 0.10 lots is 10 oz and the margin follows from the price and that cap. If a number cannot be sourced this way, we describe what it depends on instead of inventing it.

What happens when two sources disagree

When two sources disagree, the broker's own documentation wins for broker facts and the instrument specification wins for contract facts. If a third-party page says one thing about platform availability and FxPro's own material says another, the site follows FxPro. If a source implies a different pip definition for gold, the specification holds: one pip is 0.01 on XAU/USD and one lot is 100 oz. The hierarchy exists so that a conflict produces a decision rather than a footnote.

When the conflict cannot be resolved, the disputed figure is withheld rather than split down the middle. This is why no spread, commission, swap or minimum deposit appears as a number anywhere on the site: those are exactly the fields where sources routinely disagree and where a stale number would be read as a promise. Describing what a cost consists of and what it depends on is honest in a way that averaging two conflicting quotes would not be.

A disagreement about the regulator statement is handled differently again, because it is quoted rather than summarised. The wording used is the wording supplied: FxPro is licensed by the FCA (UK) and CySEC, not by the SEC of the Philippines. If a reader believes that statement is out of date, the correct response is to check the licence registers directly and treat this site's copy as a pointer, not as the authority. Nothing here overrides a regulator's own record.