When should a broker be rated a 4 or 5 star

Larry Sayer

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I think that we should look at how each of us rate the brokers we deal with as it effects others in our group. My feeling is that for a high rate that the broker should have 30 plus post with details of account size, length of time, how many withdrawals, and any problems with same. I see to many article that never state anything about being able to with draw your money with major problems. Seems that everyone is way to easy on these brokers.
:mad:
 
I think that we should look at how each of us rate the brokers we deal with as it effects others in our group. My feeling is that for a high rate that the broker should have 30 plus post with details of account size, length of time, how many withdrawals, and any problems with same. I see to many article that never state anything about being able to with draw your money with major problems. Seems that everyone is way to easy on these brokers.
:mad:

You bring up a good point. I was suggesting a little while ago that only FPA members could write reviews to try and iron out some of these pathetic ones that are posted by company employees. Though this would still be hard to impose. I think it will be very hard to regulate what is written in the review section. Your ideas are good and if we can somehow make the FPA admin aware of this they could come up with some idea?
 
Input into ratings

I am fairly new FPA, so I am not sure what the best way is to make the FPA admin aware of this so that they could come up with some idea? If everyone would take the time to think about it I am sure that some very good suggestions would come forth. :mad:
 
You definitely have to read the reviews carefully. New traders will gush over a broker if they make a little money and rip a broker if they loose. Personally, I look for reviews where the person does provide some details of how long they've traded, how withdrawals went, etc.

Then again, if someone has only been with a broker a couple of weeks and hits a severe withdrawal issue, I'd hate to see that given little credence just because the account is new. When a broker goes bad, it will take out newbies and experienced traders alike.
 
Reviews

Hi all

I like the star system on one hand, but the reviews themself have much to be desired.

And yet the review ends as slightly deceptive not purposely but people don't fully understand what 4-5 starts means.

And yet 3 stars does not look so good at first glance especially for new users looking for the 5 star broker / service etc.

So I would like to provide my idea:

1.Change the meaning of the starts as follows:

Overall Experience:
  • 1 star = bad (scam or had bad experience)
  • 2 start = fair (perhaps not a scam, but yet not very good either.
  • 3 stars = good (not a scam or have not been scammed believed things are as they should be)

Each broker would have a rating of exactly how many stars of each they have received in a review, (NOT JUST AN AGGREGATE) of the overall reviews.

Secondly we need to know what level of customer service people believe they received from the broker

Cutomer Service
  • 1 star = bad (lack of communication or further communications seems to confirm they are a scam and/or no help at all)
  • 2 start = fair (needs much improvement not very good or very little)
  • 3 stars = good (as expected or as it should be)

Third we need to know how you rate the withdraw process and if there are any problems here:

Withdraw Process
  • 1 star = bad (scam cannot withdraw money or serious problems with the withdraw process)
  • 2 start = fair (needs improvement or had trouble withdrawing money)
  • 3 stars = good (as expected or as it should be)

So in essence you could look up a broker profile sort of like ebay as oppose to reading all the reviews and looking for 5 stars, you could get an idea of the profile at a glance

It would be much easier to look at review if people simply saw for example:

Broker-A
  • Overall Experience = 3 stars = 10
  • Customer Service = 2 stars = 10
  • Withdraw Process = 2 stars = 10

Broker- B
  • Overall Experience = 3 stars =10
  • Customer Service = 2 stars =9
  • Customer Service = 1 star =1
  • Withdraw Process = 3 stars =9
  • Withdraw Process = 2 stars =1

Or something similar.
I think the current rating of 4 and 5 are sort of non essential because I the main topic of the review is to see mainly if people have good experience,if they have reliable customer service solutions and people to help them, and if they are going to steel your money.

And similarly the 3 levels of Bad,Fair,Good should also be sufficient for this and adding more tiers to see an overall picture of the broker or service at a glance.

This way you can see quickly which brokers has the higher rating more accurately.

Currently having 10 reviews of 5 stars and 10 reviews of 0 or 1 star which might produce and overall 3 star rating is not good enough.

I don't know how the aggregate is calculated but it's not a very good star system in my opinion.

I like reading the reviews but it takes sooo long to do so and especially if your reading through a company that has lots of reviews, and high stars, but also lots of negative reviews as well.
This creates confusion for new traders and old.

The at a glance star system would provide more targeted information at a glance and then you can read those reviews if desired.

Anyhow thats all I know

What do you think ?
 
Some of these suggestions are very good.

I can't force people to divulge all information, but having "sub-ratings" for customer service, order execution, and withdrawals would be useful. Keeping people from giving a 3 out of 5 when they haven't made a withdrawal would be a problem. So many people haven't figured out that 3 isn't the same as "no rating" . Giving it instead of "no rating" when a person doesn't know what rating to give hurts good companies and helps bad ones.

I also want to add something that shows how many reviewers gave each level of rating. There are a couple of companies with 8 or 9 no rating reviews and only 1 or 2 rated reviews that control the score.
 
The star rating method may not be very reliable but i think there is little the moderator can do even has fake posts/ratings were detected in recent past and subsequently removed by FPA.For me,broker review is just one of the factors to be considered in choosing a broker.There a whole lot of other considerations e.g visiting the website to know more about the company amongst other things.

A post by Pharaoh discussed these issues,anyone who is opportuned to read that article will learn a lot about brokers and how to choose one.
 
The ratings and rankings system needs a complete overhaul. I have written about this a number of times, e.g. in the "Upgrades to Review Searches" sticky thread in this "General Forex Talk" forum.

Though, a good start would be to rank by actual numerical rating (the number that you seen near the top next to the stars on the product/service review page) and not by number of stars and number of reviews. If the web site has been reasonably well programmed, this change is quite simple to do; I know how simple it is because I am a web developer and have built numerous database-driven web sites. At the moment the SQL query (when sorted by the "Ratings" column on the page) is something like this:

"SELECT ... ORDER BY NumberOfStars, NumberOfReviews"

I'm suggesting to change the query to:

"SELECT ... ORDER BY Rating"

Note also that "No Rating" reviews are being counted in NumberOfReviews, which causes the product or service to be ranked higher than other products/services with the same number of stars in the list when sorted on the page. This flaw would be eliminated if the sorting is done by Rating only.
 
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