Hello all,

As a lover of bitcoin and trading/investing with 2 decades of experience in reviewing, consulting, and supporting traditional financial services, I thought I’d start this thread to provide honest, no-bullshit reviews of trading/investing bitcoin services.

There are just so many popping up out there that it’s easy to get lost and hard to know what or who to trust. This could go a long way toward transparency and perhaps serve as a reference to newbs who are just getting started.

A bit about me: I bought my first bitcoin in 2012 and became enamored. I’ve worked in the financial services industry and have reviewed hundreds of brokers, investment services, investment firms, banks, and more. I’ve worked with nerdwallet, stockbrokers.com, The Motley Fool, Schwab, and many others.

So go ahead and name which platforms you’d like me to review. No gambling or casinos but pretty much anything else that involves investing/speculation is a go. I’ll use the service extensively if I haven’t already and do a write-up.

I'll write a professional review for the first 5 services/brokers posted here, free of charge. First come first served!

I’ll post all my reviews in this thread and build a comparison and ranking table in this first post as I get to reviewing more and more services. I’ll kick it off with a couple of brokers I’ve been using recently: whaleclub.co (bitcoin CFDs, use bitcoin to trade the real financial markets) and okcoin.com (20x leveraged futures contract on BTC/USD).

I’ll post around 1 review a week and maybe more if I have time.

Services will be reviewed according to the following framework:

• summary: a paragraph detailing pros and cons

(every topic below is given a rating out of 5 stars and a brief note)

• overall
• fees
• spreads
• order execution
• platform and tools
• customer service
• mobile trading
• ease of use
• education / simulation
• security
• social media presence
• management / ownership
• innovation
• affiliate program