ForexVue
Laurent, ForexVue author and reviewer

Laurent

Author & reviewer · 10+ years trading forex · Based in Luxembourg

Who writes this site

I'm Laurent, a Luxembourg-based trader and the author of every review, guide, and glossary entry on ForexVue. I've been trading personally for more than 15 years and actively in forex for the last 10. I'm self-taught. I hold no finance diploma, no CFA, no Series 65. What I have is a decade of live experience using retail forex platforms, and a day job that happens to be adjacent to the industry I write about.

That day job is in banking IT. I've spent the best part of twenty years building and running infrastructure for financial institutions — nearly seven years at Lombard International Assurance managing production systems, SQL servers, and backup infrastructure, and I'm currently at Rakuten Europe Bank working on servers, Active Directory, and compliance-focused systems (CyberArk, Palo Alto, Splunk alerting for SOC teams, CIS hardening). None of that makes me a trader. But it does mean I've seen the compliance, AML, and data-handling side of the financial industry from the inside, which is the lens I bring when evaluating whether a broker's regulatory claims are meaningful or cosmetic.

ForexVue is a passion project. To be transparent: since I started it, the site has generated roughly €10 in affiliate revenue total (which I've never even withdrawn), against much higher personal spend on hosting, tooling, and translation. I don't run it to make money. I run it because the forex space is full of low-quality comparison sites that exist to push whoever pays the most, and I wanted a version of this that a friend could trust me to send them to.

Editorial principles

The way I approach the site is intentionally narrower than what competitors do. A few principles that drive every decision:

  • 12 brokers, not 150. I review brokers I can personally evaluate against a consistent set of criteria. A 150-broker list looks impressive and is impossible to maintain honestly. I'd rather cover a small, well-researched circle of serious brokers properly than publish thin content on hundreds of names I've barely looked at.
  • Regulation is the floor, not a bonus. Any broker on ForexVue must hold authorisation from a tier-1 or credible tier-2 regulator — CSSF, FCA, CySEC, ASIC, FSCA, DFSA, CMA, or similar. Offshore-only brokers do not make the list, regardless of spreads or leverage.
  • Maximum country coverage beats conversion tricks. ForexVue does not set cookies, does not geo-sort brokers based on your IP to push whichever pays the most in your country, and does not personalise the ranking. Same ranking for everyone. This costs me affiliate revenue, but it's the right default for a comparison site that wants Google to take it seriously.
  • Affiliate disclosure is above the fold, not buried. Every review, every country page, and every guide discloses affiliate links before the first CTA. If that costs a few clicks, fine — it's a cost of doing the thing honestly.

Brokers I've personally tested

Of the 12 brokers I cover, three are ones I've opened live or substantive demo accounts with over the years:

  • XM — Daily driver. Easy to use, solid demo, low minimum deposit.
  • XTB — Tested long ago. xStation 5 is a genuinely differentiated platform.
  • Exness — Tested. Strong withdrawal speed; leverage options are aggressive.

The remaining 9 brokers are evaluated from regulatory filings, published trading conditions, platform documentation, and cross-referenced third-party data. I'm explicit about this in the How We Rate methodology and on every review: ForexVue has not conducted live trading tests with deposited funds for every broker listed. I prefer that honest disclosure to the pretence of having personally traded on 40 platforms.

The practice game (beta)

I also built ForexVue Trader, a browser-based forex practice game. It's a beta — not a finished product, still rough in places. I built it because the single best thing any new trader can do before risking real money is spend time on a demo, and I wanted a zero-friction way to let visitors do that directly on the site without creating an account anywhere. It's noindexed and deliberately kept outside the main content for now. Consider it a learning tool I'm still improving in my spare time.

Published work on ForexVue

Broker reviews (12)

Guides (4)

  • Forex Trading for Beginners — Complete starter guide covering what forex is, how leverage and pip value work, and the first decisions a new trader should make.
  • Is Forex Trading Profitable? — An honest look at broker-published loss statistics (74–89% of retail accounts lose money) and what separates the minority who make it work.
  • Best Time to Trade Forex — Session overlaps, liquidity windows, and why Tuesday–Thursday during London-NY overlap matters more than most beginners realize.
  • How to Open an XM Account — Step-by-step walkthrough of opening an XM account — the broker I've used personally the longest.

Glossary

411 forex and trading terms, each with a dedicated page, structured definition, worked examples, and cross-links to related terms and calculators. Available in 25 languages. Browse the full glossary →

Calculators

Six free tools: Pip, Position size, Margin, Profit/Loss, Compounding, and Market Hours.

Contact

The best way to reach me is email: contact@forexvue.com. I read every message, though I can't always reply quickly — this site is a side project and my day job comes first.

If you've spotted something wrong on a review, a calculator giving an incorrect result, a broken link, or if you want to suggest a broker to consider for a future review, please write in. Corrections get priority.

Based in Luxembourg. No phone support. No affiliated company behind ForexVue — the site is operated by me personally.