How We Make Money
Written by investor.com
Investor.com was founded as a consumer advocacy project, serving Americans as a trusted resource for researching and comparing financial advisors. That original mission has expanded to include thorough, unbiased guidance on a range of personal-finance topics.
Our editorial decisions are, and always have been, independent and impartial, and our evaluations of financial services and products are based on data as well as the professional assessments of our editorial team’s topic experts.
We will never accept compensation to boost ratings (we don’t do “pay-to-play” here), and our evaluations are based on thousands of hours of in-depth, hands-on research.
Our opinions simply can’t be bought — by anyone. So how do we make money?
We make money in three ways:
- We feature clearly labeled advertising on some of our pages.
- We partner with financial service providers in affiliate relationships.
- We give financial advisory firms the opportunity to support our mission.
Our partners compensate us for referrals completed from affiliate links and some choose to become a Mission Supporter; but they can’t pay us to alter a review, modify an opinion, or inflate a star rating. Our editorial team operates strictly independently of our advertising team in order to maintain objectivity.
Our editorial principles
If we love a financial service or product, we’ll tell you.
If we think a service or product has room to improve (or should be avoided altogether), we’ll say so and explain why.
If we’ve determined that using a service or product puts your money at risk, we’ll say so — no matter what.
Here are a few things that we’ll never do to make money:
- We never change our opinion of a product or service, or modify our evaluation process, to gain or preserve an affiliate partnership.
- We never highlight (or deliberately conceal) a specific product or service to gain or maintain an affiliate relationship.
- We never alter our proprietary data-driven algorithms to favor an affiliate partner.
- We never share marketing revenue information or advertising campaign data with our researchers or our editorial team.
Your trust in us, as well as the trust we have earned from the industry as a whole, is of the utmost importance to our mission and our charter as a Certified B Corporation™. To that end, we are open with our readers about who our partners are. See below for a list of our current partners and mission supporters.
Our partners & supporters
As a transparency-first organization, below you will find a list of all the partners and supporters with whom we currently work. If you use our links to visit the website of one of the following financial service providers, or open an account with any of the following providers, we may receive compensation.
Partners
- Axos Bank
- Barclays Bank
- Live Oak Bank
- Amazon
- Charles Schwab
- E*TRADE
- Fidelity Investments
- Finviz
- Interactive Brokers
- Robinhood
- Seeking Alpha
- Stock Rover
- TD Ameritrade
- Trademetria
- TraderSync
- Tradervue
- TradeStation
- TradingView
- Webull
Mission Supporters
- West Branch Capital
- Bogart Wealth
- Michael Brady & Co
- Better Financial Education
- Oui Financial
- Windfall Advisors LLC
- Wallace Hart Capital Management
- Dash Investments
- Campbell Wealth Management
- Retirable
- Certified Advisory Corp
- Wambolt & Associates
- ML&R Wealth Management
- Outlook Wealth Advisors
- CMH Wealth Management
- Haddon Wealth Management
- City Center Advisors
- Intelligent Capitalworks
- The Goff Financial Group
- Fisher Investments