Editorial policy

The sourcing rule

A factual claim is published only if we have read it in a primary document: a regulator's own publication, an official body's own figures, a peer-reviewed paper, or an operator's own technical documentation. Reading someone else's summary of a source is how we find it; it is never evidence of what it says.

Specifically, we will not publish:

• a statistic whose origin we cannot trace to a document;
• a figure quoted from an article that quotes another article;
• a number we have only seen in a search result or a summary;
• an invented author, credential, qualification, award or test result;
• search volumes, difficulty scores or rankings, which we have no tool to measure.

Where a widely repeated number fails that test, we say so in the article and leave the number out. There is a worked example of exactly this in our investigation of the figures this industry repeats.

The research ledger

Every claim is recorded centrally before it reaches an article, with the source behind it, the date it was retrieved, and a note saying what was actually read. Each claim carries one of four states:

• Verified — the source supports the claim as written.
• Qualified — the wording was narrowed until it matched what the source actually supports.
• Editorial — resolved by precise wording, typically where the claim is about an absence rather than a fact.
• Unresolved — still needs a source. An unresolved claim appears on the article page as an open research note, and the article cannot leave research status while one remains.

The ledger is synchronised into article frontmatter mechanically, and the build fails if the two disagree. That is deliberate: a source list that can drift from the research behind it is decoration.

How an article reaches publication

Four states, in order, and the gate is enforced in code rather than by habit:

1. Draft — being written.
2. Research — written, with at least one claim still unsourced. Every open claim is shown on the page.
3. Review — research complete, sources recorded, nothing outstanding, waiting for a human editor.
4. Published — requires at least one verified source, no open research notes, and a recorded approval naming a real editor and the date they gave it.

An article cannot be marked published without that approval; the schema refuses it and the build stops. Articles are approved one at a time. Nothing is bulk-published.

Anything not yet published is labelled as such on its own page, so a draft can never be mistaken for a finished piece by a reader or by a search engine. Only published articles are served or indexed in production.

What we do not publish at all

• Advice, signals or recommendations. Nothing on this site tells anyone what to trade, when, or in what size.
• Performance claims. No win rates, returns or track records, ours or anyone else's.
• Price levels or worked figures presented as real. Any arithmetic example uses invented numbers and is labelled hypothetical in the text.
• Rankings, scores or "best of" comparisons.
• Review, rating or FAQ structured data. The markup on this site is limited to organisation, website, breadcrumb and article types, and the article type is emitted only for published pages.

Images

Every image here is generated from a drawing script in this repository and credited as such. None is a photograph, none is licensed from anyone, and no illustration contains prices, balances or performance curves — a shape that reads as "this made money" is a claim whatever the caption says. Each image carries alt text describing what is visible in it rather than what the article argues.

Corrections

If a claim here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Email the desk through the contact page with the article, the specific sentence and, if you have one, the source.

What happens then:

• a factual error is corrected and the article's updated date changes;
• where the correction changes what an article argues, the change is described in the piece rather than made silently;
• where a claim turns out to be untraceable, it is removed and the ledger entry is moved to unresolved rather than quietly deleted.

We will not remove accurate, sourced material because someone objects to it, and we do not accept payment to amend or withdraw an article.

Commercial disclosure

The Measured Trader has a commercial relationship with TheNextLevel. We say so plainly because readers are entitled to know who is behind what they read.

The arrangement, in plain words: this publication is produced as part of a marketing project for it. It does not decide what gets covered, it does not change a sourced claim, and it never supplies a figure we have not read in a primary document.

Every promotional placement is labelled as such, its links carry rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", and The Measured Trader does not describe itself as independent while the relationship exists.

Any commercial or affiliate link on this site is labelled as promotional, sits in its own block rather than inside the editorial text, carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", and is explained on the page it appears on. The full position is on the commercial disclosure page, and who writes this publication is set out on the about page.

Risk

The Measured Trader is not a broker, an adviser or a trading service. Nothing here is investment advice. Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of losing money quickly; the detail is on the risk disclosure page.