Privacy

The calculators

Nothing you type into the cost calculator, the position size calculator or the challenge calculator is transmitted anywhere. It is processed by JavaScript in your browser and stays there. Reload the page and the fields are empty again; nothing is stored between visits.

This page used to justify that by saying there was no server to receive the numbers. There is one now — it counts page views and records affiliate clicks — so that argument no longer holds and has been replaced with something better than an argument. The list of fields the page may send is fixed, and the build refuses to publish if the code that sends them so much as mentions a form value, a field, or the query string. A check that fails the build is a stronger guarantee than the absence of a server ever was, because it keeps holding after somebody changes their mind.

What is counted

Page views, by this site itself. No third party is involved, so nothing leaves this server. Each view records this and nothing else:

• the path of the page — /brokers/
• where the link came from, as a host and path, without the query string
• whether the screen is phone, tablet or desktop sized — a bucket, never a measurement
• your browser's primary language, without the region: en, not en-GB
• three campaign labels, utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, if the link you followed carried them

Those last three are the only part of the address after the ? that is ever read, and they exist only in links we published ourselves — they say which post or message a visit came from, on the platforms that hide that. Nothing else in a query string is looked at, because a query string can carry anything, including something you pasted.

That is not a promise about our care. The build refuses to publish if the code that sends this reads any other name from the address, or reads one without naming it — so the list above is checked rather than described.

There is no cookie, no identifier, and nothing that could connect two page views to each other — not within a visit and not across days. That is a real cost: it means the figure is page views rather than visitors, and the dashboard says so.

The usual way to count visitors without cookies is a daily hash of your IP address and browser. It works, it is what most privacy-focused analytics do, and it was in an early draft of this. It is not here because a hash of your address is still derived from your address, and this page would have had to stop saying what it says above.

Automated traffic

Most requests to a small site are made by crawlers rather than people. Those are marked as such and kept rather than deleted, so the dashboard can show what it excluded next to what it counted. The user agent of a request that was turned away is kept for thirty days, so the filter itself can be judged, and then erased; for a request that was counted, it is not kept at all. Page views are deleted after 400 days.

Your IP address

Never stored. It is used for one thing, in memory, for one minute: refusing more than sixty page-view submissions from the same address, so that one script cannot decide what our own statistics say. It is not written to the database and not written to a log.

Like every web server, the host serving these pages keeps its own standard access logs. We do not analyse them and they are not joined to anything.

Cookies

This site sets none for readers. Not for counting, not for preferences, not for advertising. The only cookie it is capable of setting belongs to the administrator's login, and you cannot receive one without the password.

Because nothing here identifies anyone and no cookie is set, no consent banner is required under GDPR or the ePrivacy Directive. We would rather not have one.

Links to brokers

Some links are affiliate links, marked as such in the footer. They pass through a page on this site at /go/, which shows the disclosure, and then through /r/, which records the click and sends you on.

That record holds three things: which partner, which page of ours the link was on, and a random number generated at the moment of the click. The random number is passed to the broker so that if they later tell us they paid a commission, we can tell which page earned it. It identifies a click. It is not derived from anything about you, no address is stored beside it, and two clicks by the same person produce two unrelated records — which is the point rather than a limitation.

Once you arrive at a broker or prop firm you are on their site under their privacy policy. They will know we referred you. What they do beyond that is between you and them.

One address, and whose it is

When the administrator signs in or changes an affiliate link, that action is logged with their IP address. It is the only address stored anywhere on this site, it belongs to us rather than to a reader, and it is there because changing where an affiliate link points is the one action here that moves money and would otherwise leave no trace.

Getting in touch

Since we hold no personal data about readers, there is nothing to request a copy of or ask us to delete. If you think something on this page is inaccurate, that is worth telling us — accuracy is the entire point of the site.