Editorial standards on forex-basics.com
Forex is YMYL territory — Your Money, Your Life. Every answer we publish deals with the reader's money, so we hold ourselves to standards that would survive scrutiny from a financial regulator. Below we explain who writes, how we handle facts, what we never do and where to report errors.
Who writes the articles
Our full-time editor and author is Jarosław Wasiński — founder and editor-in-chief of MyBank.pl, which has been running since 2004. Jarek has more than twenty years of experience in the Polish financial sector, and since 2007 he has regularly analysed the Forex market and written about it for a Polish-language audience. His full biography, with links to professional profiles, is on the Editorial team page.
All content is signed with a real first and last name, never with a pseudonym. Each article carries a publication date, a last-verification date and a clear author attribution. We do not publish anonymous content — if there is no human signature below the text, that text never appears on this site.
The editorial workflow — step by step
A single article passes through five stages. First comes research: we collect primary sources (BIS Triennial Survey reports, ESMA statements, KNF and FCA documents, broker prospectuses), historical price data and our own notes from real trades. Then a working draft is written, with every number followed by its source and the date of measurement.
After the draft we run a fact-check: every percentage, every date, every quoted spread has to be confirmed by at least one official document. If the source is a broker, we take the official KID (Key Information Document) from the broker's website, not a marketing banner. If the source is an ESMA statement, we link to the specific document by its year of publication, never to a vague memory of "having read this somewhere".
After fact-checking, the article goes through a language pass — we check whether industry terminology has been translated into language that a person hearing the word "spread" for the first time will actually understand. Our rule of thumb: if you cannot explain a concept to an eight-year-old, you are not ready to publish it. Only when the whole piece holds together does the article go live with its `published` and `last_verified` dates.
Do we use artificial intelligence
Yes — and we say so openly. AI helps us in the research phase (quick summaries of long BIS reports, suggestions of related topics), but every piece of content published on forex-basics.com goes through manual human editing. We do not publish unedited language-model output. Patterns such as "clusters of dates and acronyms with no verbs", which are typical of machine-generated writing, are systematically removed at the editing stage.
Internally we call this "AI compression syndrome", and we run an automated validator that blocks a commit if it detects such patterns. Put plainly: AI helps gather raw material, but the text you read has been rewritten by a human who has actually traded Forex.
The sources we cite
Our source hierarchy is explicit. At the top we place regulator documents: BIS (Bank for International Settlements — global Forex turnover data), ESMA (European market regulator — statements on CFD products and retail loss rates), KNF (the Polish Financial Supervision Authority — Polish regulation and broker licences), FCA and CySEC for UK and Cyprus-based brokers.
Lower in the hierarchy: CFA Institute (ethics and fundamental-analysis methodology), Reuters and Bloomberg for market data, official KIDs and broker prospectuses, and audited annual reports of CFD firms. We do not cite trading blogs, retail forums or YouTube channels — even when their authors happen to be right. If a claim only appears in those sources, we treat it as a hypothesis to verify, never as a fact to repeat.
Verification and update protocol
Once a quarter — four times a year — we re-check every outbound link. We confirm that it still points to the correct document, that the regulator has not moved the URL, and that the document itself has not been superseded. Articles containing numbers that change over time — broker spreads, ESMA loss statistics, swap rates — are tagged `freshness: dynamic` and verified more often. Evergreen content (definitions, mechanics of the market) is reviewed once a year.
The `last_verified` field on each article is updated only when we have actually re-read the sources. We never bump the date without re-checking the content. Our correction policy is detailed on the Corrections policy page.
Neutrality: neither politics nor a single broker
Forex-basics.com is apolitical. We do not comment on the decisions of governments or parliaments except in terms of market impact (for instance, a Federal Reserve rate decision moves USD — we describe that factually, without political judgement). We do not recommend a single broker as "best for everyone". Our broker reviews use a weighted scoring framework documented on the Review methodology page, and the same scoring is applied to every broker — regardless of whether we have an affiliate agreement with them.