Editorial policy

What the site publishes

Five kinds of page. Tips argue a position about how to trade, and each one says where its advice stops applying. Trading terms define the words brokers, regulators and tax forms use, with a worked example. Questions answer what traders type when something in their account surprises them. Economy pages explain how policy and the economy reach a trader's positions. Buyer's guides, under Reviews, explain how to compare providers of one product. There are also two worksheets.

The site does not publish stock picks, market forecasts or trade alerts. Its buyer's guides name no company and rank nothing, because an honest ranking would need current rate and fee data and hands-on testing that the site does not have. It takes no payment for coverage and carries no affiliate links. The price strip under the header shows quotes for a fixed list of large companies; it is market information, not a selection or a recommendation.

How a page is made

Every page starts in a written plan that fixes its address, what it must answer, the rules or sums it may rely on and the pages it links to. The draft is written with AI assistance, as the AI disclosure explains, and then has to pass automated checks before a reviewer sees it. The reviewer's name appears at the top of the page. Pages are published under the site's name and carry no writer's byline.

Numbers, rules and sources

A figure on this site is either a rule with the body that sets it named, or hypothetical arithmetic with the working on the page. The site does not print statistics it cannot source. Rules change, and brokers often apply stricter versions of them, so pages about rules tell you what to confirm on your own account and where the rule itself is published. Tax pages explain how rules work in general and send you to the IRS publication and a tax professional for your own case.

The writing rules

There is one house voice and no personas. These are the rules every article is written to. The ones marked "checked" are enforced by the automated checks, so a page that breaks them cannot be published; the rest are applied in review.

1. review Address the reader as "you". Examples are hypotheticals set up in the second person ("Say you buy 300 shares at 18.40"), never stories about a writer.
2. checked No first person singular and no biography. The site has no named author, so nothing may present personal experience as lived: no spouse, no colleagues, no "the year I got this wrong".
3. review "We" means the publication and appears only for editorial choices, such as what the site declines to publish. A few times a page at most.
4. review Say plainly what is known and what is not. One hedge per claim at most. Where nobody knows, say that nobody knows and move on.
5. review No statistics, studies, success rates or market figures without a source on the page. Numbers are either a stated rule with a pointer to its source or illustrative arithmetic with the working shown.
6. review Every tip says where it stops applying. Blunt pieces concede once and briefly. Careful pieces weigh both sides and may end without a verdict.
7. checked Vary sentence length hard: short sentences of a few words, long ones that run past thirty and carry a whole chain of reasoning, and few in the middle band.
8. checked No em dashes. Use a comma, a colon, a full stop, or rewrite the sentence.
9. checked Define things by what they are. Two contrast constructions a page at most, counting "not X but Y", "rather than", "instead of", and the two-sentence version.
10. checked One short aphoristic closing line per article at most. Most sections simply end when the point is made.
11. review US spelling and US market conventions. Rules cited are US rules (SEC, FINRA, IRS), named as such.
12. review No broker, platform or product names. Describe the feature, and tell the reader where to find it on their own platform.
13. review Vary the opening: a situation the reader is in, a flat claim, the question as typed, a sum worked through, a rule quoted, or a definition. No two neighboring articles open the same way.

Independence

No broker, platform or product is named on the site, and none has paid for anything on it. If that changes, for example through advertising, paid placements will be labeled where they appear and this page will be updated first.

Corrections

Report an error through the contact page, naming the page and the sentence or number. Factual errors are corrected on the page and the page's updated date changes. A change to what a page advises is noted in the page itself. Pages are also reviewed when a rule they describe changes. For how to read everything here in the first place, see the risk disclaimer.