How this site is paid for

What stays true whatever gets switched on

• The site itself fetches nothing from another host. Every font, script, image and data file of its own comes from this domain, and there is no analytics of somebody else's. The one exception is Google's advertising script, on the pages that carry ads, after the consent dialogue.
• Nothing paid for changes what a page says. The subject of every page here was chosen before anybody could have paid for the space beside it, and no sponsor sees a page before it is published.
• The disclaimer is not for sale. Rule two of this project is that nothing here is advice, and no commercial arrangement makes an exception to it. See the disclaimer.
• Every page stays free and open. No metering, no registration wall, no "three articles a month". A reference that gates its own subject matter is not a reference.

Advertising: what it is and what it is not

Most pages carry advertising served by Google AdSense. It is how the site stays free without a paywall, and these are the limits on it:

• An ad is not a recommendation. Which ad appears is decided by Google's auction, not by this site, and nothing here endorses what an ad offers. Rule two of this project — nothing here is advice — applies to the space beside the text as much as to the text.
• Nothing is written for the ads. Every page's subject and wording were decided without reference to what might be advertised next to it.
• Consent comes first. Google's own consent dialogue asks before any advertising cookie is set, and the privacy policy says exactly what Google receives.
• Not everywhere. The legal notice, the privacy policy, the disclaimer, the licences page and every case study carry no ads: a page whose job is to say what the site is not, or somebody's failure, is not inventory.

Sponsorship: one per section, text only, served from here

The other arrangement is the older one: a named sponsor, disclosed, whose card is a sentence served from this domain. It is worth many times the per-impression rate for the same reason a specialist journal's back page is — the audience is specific and the sponsor knows exactly who they are reaching — and it breaks none of the four promises above.

This is what one looks like. It is an example rather than a real sponsor, and it says so:

The four rules a sponsor agrees to

• Text only. No logo, no image, no script, no pixel. Partly because an image from another host would break the promise at the top of this page outright, and partly because a logo file is somebody else's copyright sitting in this repository, which the licensing rules here do not allow. A sponsor buys a sentence.
• Never beside the thing it sells. A sponsor may not appear on a page about an instrument it issues, a desk it staffs, or a case study naming it. A card beside the instrument would function as a recommendation whatever the label above it said.
• Never on a page whose job is to say what this site is not. No legal page, no disclaimer — and no case study, because a case study is somebody's failure and money next to it changes what the page is.
• No influence over anything. Not the subject, not the wording, not the order, not the timing. A sponsor who wants a page written about something is asking for the one thing that is not on sale.

The rules are not only written here. They are in the build: a sponsor declared on a forbidden section, or one whose entry looks like a broker, fails the build rather than reaching a reader.

Affiliate links: books and tools, never a broker

An affiliate link pays this site a commission when somebody buys something after following it. The category is worth having and it needs a hard boundary, so here is the boundary:

• Books and reference works — allowed. A reader who has just finished the concepts section reasonably wants to know what to read next, and a book changes nobody's financial position.
• Software and general tools — allowed where the tool is genuinely useful for the work and is not itself a financial product.
• Brokers, trading platforms, CFD providers, spread betting, copy trading, signal services, robo-advisers, funds and issuers — refused outright, permanently. A commission paid when somebody opens an account is a payment for producing a customer, which is the exact shape of the recommendation rule two forbids. In the EU it is a financial promotion besides, and this is not a regulated firm.

The refusal list is not a matter of judgement each time: those words are in the build, and a link whose target or label contains one of them fails it. The argument for making an exception will always be available and the answer never changes, so the answer is written into the code instead of into somebody's memory.

Where a link ever does appear it will carry three things at once: a visible marker in the sentence, rel="sponsored nofollow" in the markup, and a disclosure on the page carrying it. Any one of the three missing fails the build.

Where the money is actually meant to come from

In order of what each is worth, which is not the order most people would guess:

1. Team seats — a graduate programme, a risk function, a treasury team, a course. One conversation is worth hundreds of individual subscriptions, and the buyer's real obstacle is a purchase order rather than a price.
2. Sponsorship, as described above.
3. Pro — for individual readers, and it deliberately unlocks retention and portability rather than knowledge: exports, the personal crib sheet, the offline copy. Nothing that is free today moves behind it.
4. Affiliate, within the boundary above — books and tools, never anything a reader could open an account with. Where else to learn this is the page that would carry it, and it shows exactly what a paid link looks like and states what is refused. Small, and it is not the point.

Advertising is not on that list, for the reasons set out at the top.

Why any of this is written down before it happens

Because the rules that survive are the ones written while nothing is at stake. Every constraint above is easy to accept today and would be hard to accept in the month somebody offers real money to relax one of them — which is precisely when the rule has to already exist, already be public, and already fail a build.

If something on this site ever looks like it was influenced by who is paying for it, the arrangement was wrong and this page is the standard to hold it to. The address for saying so is on the legal notice.