What is The Good Money Guide?
The Good Money Guide is a UK based comparison site and guide for investing, trading and currency accounts, products and services. Through in-depth expert guides, client reviews, interviews, news and views we aim to connect clients to the most appropriate financial service provider for their needs.
Why use The Good Money Guide?
“We have two decades experience in the investment industry and through our network of experts, analysts, comparison tools, guides, news, reviews and interviews are able to connect investors to the most appropriate brokers and financial service providers.
Richard Berry, Founder – Good Money Guide
Recommended Providers
If you see our “Good Money Guide Recommended” badge on a provider website it means we have thoroughly reviewed and tested them and would be comfortable recommending them to others.
Our methodology for recommending
Before we feature or recommend a provider on Good Money Guide we conduct a series of due diligence including:
- Expert testing – so that we can produce written and video reviews we test all the accounts we feature thoroughly. We always open live accounts with real money and test in live environments and often we also directly talk to the product developers who can highlight features most people are unaware of
- CEO interviews – we interview the CEO’s from the companies we feature. This gives some great insight into why a company was founded, how it is run and sometimes, most importantly, the culture and ethos.
- Data analysis – we compare pricing, market access and combine this with the scores from our awards survey to give search provide a unique score
- Regulation – we always ensure they are regulated by the appropriate financial services regulator (in the UK this is the FCA)
- Customer reviews – all providers featured ask their customers to tell us what they think of a provider for our annual awards
Who contributes to the Good Money Guide?
Richard Berry
Jackson Wong
Jackson has over 15 years experience as a financial analyst. Previously a director of Stockcube Research as head of Investors Intelligence providing market timing advice and research to some of the world's largest institutions and hedge funds. Expertise: Global macroeconomic investment strategy, statistical backtesting, asset allocation, and cross-asset research. Jackson has a PhD in Finance from Durham University.
Darren Sinden
Darren is a veteran of the financial markets with almost 36 years of experience under his belt. He has worked in trading, sales, analytical, and research roles, he has been a regular guest & commentator on financial television channels and publications. During his career, Darren has been fortunate to act for and advise major hedge funds and investment banks as well as HNWI. Darren analyses the markets using a blend of technical and fundamental analysis
Edward Sheldon
Based in London, Edward is an investment writer whose clients include a broad range of financial services firms located all over the world. Prior to launching his own investment writing business, Edward spent 15 years working in private wealth management and institutional asset management, both in the UK and in Australia. Edward holds a Commerce degree from the University of Melbourne, as well as the Investment Management Certificate (IMC) and the highly-regarded Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) qualification.
Gill Wadsworth
Gill has 14 years' experience in financial journalism, has been an editor on an FT publication and produced articles for Financial Times, Financial News, Pensions Expert, Pensions Insight, National Association of Pension Funds, Portfolio Institutional, Engaged Investor, IPE
Hannah Smith
Hannah Smith is a freelance financial journalist with 14 years' experience covering asset management, personal finance and business. She writes for a range of consumer and B2B publications including Money Observer, Shares, MoneyWeek, FE Trustnet, Morningstar, Investment Week and has broadcast experience producing for BBC Radio 5 Live Business.
Ruth Jackson-Kirby
Ruth Jackson-Kirby has been writing about personal finance for 15 years. She writes for The Sunday Times, Good Housekeeping, MoneyWeek and Moneywise.
Jonathan Davis MA, MSc, MCSI
Jonathan Davis MCSI has been analysing and writing about financial markets for more than 35 years. Initially, as a business journalist on The Times, The Economist and The Independent, more recently as a qualified professional investor and founder/editor of the Investment-Reader.com website. Jonathan has also written several books on investing including Money Makers, Investing With Anthony Bolton, Templeton’s Way With Money and The Investment Trusts Handbook.
How we make money
We only include companies that we have used ourselves, have interviewed the senior management, have a good reputation within the industry and with their customers, or do something really different. We will often include big brands so they can be compared to alternative disruptive providers.
If you click on the outbound links in the comparison tables or review pages companies pay us in one of the below ways.
- Pay per click – companies pay us a fee every time you click on a link from our website to theirs.
- Cost per acquisition – companies pay us a fee every time we introduce a customers
- Revenue share or rebate – we receive a percentage of the revenue generated from accounts introduced.
- Fixed fee – a company pays us a fixed fee for being featured in the comparison tables
We do not run third party advertising networks on the Good Money Guide, in my opinion they are far too easy for spammers, scammers and unscruplious advertisers to infiltrate. We maintain complete control of the financial service providers that are promoted. Richard Berry
The types of agreements are called performance-based marketing. It is one of the most efficient forms of advertising, as companies only pay us for results. It means that providers can reduce their marketing spend and therefore the fees they charge customers.
The fees and commissions you pay your financial service provider are not affected by what a firm pays us for promoting them in the comparison tables.
Our objective is to be balanced, and champion providers that excel in customer service and innovation.
Inclusion in our comparison tables is at our absolute discretion. In fact, we often turn down providers and include many others we do not have commercial agreements with.