Noam Korbl is the co-founder and head of testing at CompareForexBrokers. He leads spread, commission and execution testing, working every cost as an all-in GBP total rather than a headline spread, and writes the site’s cost and execution education content.
About me
I came to broker comparison through trading rather than writing. Two decades of placing real trades taught me where brokers compete honestly and where they hide a cost, and that is the lens I bring to testing. Justin runs the broker ratings and the rating model; I focus on the parts of the test that decide what a trade actually costs to open and close.
My approach to a broker is to ignore the headline and rebuild the cost from the parts. A “zero commission” account is rarely free, it just moves the cost into a wider spread, so I compare the spread plus commission as one total in GBP rather than letting either number stand alone. The same discipline applies to swap rates on positions held overnight, currency-conversion charges on a non-GBP account, and the inactivity fees that quietly erode a dormant balance. A broker that looks cheapest on the front page often is not once those pieces are added up.
Background
I have traded forex since the late 1990s, and I co-founded Compare Forex Brokers with Justin Grossbard in 2014. There is no UK financial-services credential behind my name, no CISI or CFA, and no one else on the team holds one either; like Justin, I would rather say so plainly than dress up something we do not have. What stands behind the cost and execution work is the testing itself: costs rebuilt from the parts into one GBP total, and figures checked against the broker’s own schedule and its FCA register entry rather than taken from marketing.
Why I focus on education
Most of the questions a new trader asks come down to cost and mechanics, and most comparison sites answer neither clearly. Spread, commission, swap, margin: each one sounds technical and each one is simple once it is explained in plain terms. The education pages exist to close that gap, so a reader can judge a broker rather than take a ranking on trust.
There is a second reason. A trader who understands how margin and leverage work is far less likely to be caught out by a close-out or a fast move against an oversized position. The FCA caps that leverage for UK retail clients for exactly that reason, and the education content is where we explain what those caps mean in practice rather than leaving them as numbers on a regulator’s page.
The misconception I correct most often is that a low spread means a cheap broker. It can, but spread is only one line in the cost. A broker can advertise a tight spread and claw it back through a per-lot commission, a poor overnight financing rate, or a conversion charge on a non-GBP balance. When I rank brokers on cost, the figure that counts is the all-in total a UK trader actually pays to open, hold and close a position, worked in GBP, on the account type they would really use. Getting a reader to ask for that total, rather than the headline, is most of the job.
What I write on this site
My work concentrates on the things I test. I write the spread and commission comparisons, the execution and ECN material, and the platform explainers that sit behind them. The same testing feeds the cost sections of the site’s broker reviews. Keeping my writing on the topics I actually test is deliberate: it gives the work a real footprint rather than a thin co-founder byline spread across everything.
The cost side is where I spend most of my time. Spread is an observed average, not a marketing “from” figure, so I look at how a broker quotes across the day and across account types, because a commission-free account with a wider spread often costs more in total than a raw-spread account that charges a fee. Execution is the other half: a tight quote is worthless if the fill is slow or rejected, so the ECN and execution pages exist to separate the brokers that route honestly from the ones that look cheap on paper.
ECN is the part readers ask about most and understand least. The label gets used loosely, so the test is what a broker actually does: whether it passes orders to a liquidity pool at raw market prices and charges a transparent commission, or whether it sets the price itself and takes the other side. Both models can be fair, and both can be expensive, but they are not the same thing, and a UK trader paying for “ECN” deserves to know which one they are getting. That distinction is what the execution testing is built to expose, and it is why the ECN and platform pages carry my name rather than a general byline.
You will find that footprint on the ECN forex broker UK guide, across the trading platforms section, and through the education pages on cost and margin.
How to reach me
The best route to the team, including me, is the contact page. Messages land in a monitored inbox the team reads.
Fact-checked by David Levy, head of content at CompareForexBrokers. Read our editorial standards.