1. Every affiliate link we have, listed
We think a disclosure you cannot verify is not a disclosure, so here is the complete list rather than a description of one.
- /markets/goldOne link to Silver Gold Bull, a precious metals retailer, in a clearly bounded box below the price data. Marked "Affiliate link".
- /markets/silverThe same link, on the silver page, in the same position and with the same label.
That is the entire list. There are no affiliate links in our guides, none in our calculators, none on any cryptocurrency or stock page, and none in the navigation or the footer. If that changes, this page changes with it — and the revision date at the top changes too, so you can tell whether what you are reading is current.
2. How the money actually moves
The two links route through tkqlhce.com, a tracking domain operated by CJ Affiliate, one of the older affiliate networks. When you click, the network records that the visit came from us and sets a cookie so that a later purchase can be attributed. If you buy, the retailer pays the network a commission out of its own margin, and the network passes a share to us.
Two consequences are worth stating plainly. First, the commission is not added to your price — it comes out of the seller's margin, and we have no ability to set, raise or discount what you pay. Second, we never see what you bought, how much you spent, or who you are. The network reports totals to us, not transactions. We know that referrals happened; we do not know whose.
3. What the arrangement does not buy
The gold and silver pages carry the LBMA benchmark price — the price physically settled twice a day in London — with the fixing date shown, exactly as they would if no commercial relationship existed. They carry the same warnings about storage costs, dealer premiums over spot, and the spread between what a dealer sells at and what a dealer buys back at. None of that is softened because a link sits further down the page.
We do not accept payment for a favourable review, a ranking position, the removal of a risk warning, or the omission of a competitor. No partner sees an article before it is published, and no partner has ever been given the right to approve or veto anything on this site. Where we recommend against something, we say so whether or not a commercial relationship exists — the editorial policy sets out the standard that applies either way.
4. How to identify an affiliate link yourself
You should not have to take our word for it, so there are two markers and you can check both.
The visible one.Affiliate links carry the words "Affiliate link" next to them, in the same block, not hidden behind a tooltip or buried in a footnote.
The technical one. They carry rel="sponsored" in the HTML. That is the attribute Google asks publishers to use for links placed as part of an advertisement or a paid arrangement, and it is the one search engines read. Open the page source and search for the word sponsored: if it is not there, the link is not paid. This is a claim you can falsify in about ten seconds, which is rather the point of making it.
5. What is never monetised
A large share of the outbound links on this site exist so you can check a figure at its source. Those are never affiliate links, and never will be:
- RegulatorsSEC, CFTC, FCA, ESMA, CONSOB, BaFin, AMF, CNMV
- Central banksFederal Reserve, ECB, and their published series
- Data providersCoinGecko, Financial Modeling Prep, Alpha Vantage, Polygon.io
- Statistical sourcesFRED, LBMA, national statistics offices
- Tax authoritiesIRS, and the equivalent body in each market we serve
- News organisationsCited only as sources, never for payment
Monetising a link to a regulator or a data source would corrupt the one thing that makes the rest of the site worth reading: that when we quote a number, you can go and check it without wondering why we sent you there.
6. The rules this page is written to
United States.The Federal Trade Commission's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, at 16 CFR Part 255, require clear and conspicuous disclosure of any material connection between a publisher and a product it endorses — a commission being the clearest example of one. The FTC's guidance is that a disclosure must be hard to miss, near the claim it qualifies, and in plain language.
European Union. Vextor Capital publishes in Spanish, German, Italian and French as well as English, so the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) applies. It treats advertising presented as editorial content without a clear disclosure as a misleading practice. The Omnibus Directive (EU) 2019/2161 strengthened enforcement of the same principles and increased the penalties available to national authorities.
We apply one standard across all five markets rather than the minimum required in each. A reader in Milan or Munich sees the same disclosure as a reader in Chicago, because the reason for disclosing is not that a regulator requires it.
7. Advertising is a different thing
This site also carries advertising, served by Google AdSense. It is worth separating the two clearly, because they are often confused.
Advertising appears in bounded ad slots and is chosen by an automated auction, not by us. We do not know which advertiser will appear next to which article, we have no relationship with the advertisers, and an advertiser cannot buy editorial coverage by buying an ad. Affiliate links are the opposite: deliberately placed by us, in editorial context, and therefore disclosed individually. What advertising collects and how to refuse it is covered by our privacy policy and cookie policy.
8. How to read any site that earns commissions, including this one
Affiliate income is not disqualifying on its own — a great deal of useful financial writing is funded that way, and the alternative is usually a paywall. What matters is whether the money is shaping what you are being told. Four questions separate the two cases, and they work on any site, not only ours.
Is every recommended product a paying one? If a comparison table lists five products and all five pay the publisher, the table is a sales sheet with a ranking attached. Honest comparisons include the option that pays nothing when it is the better one.
Are the risks described as fully as the benefits? Storage costs, dealer premiums, exit spreads, lock-up periods and fees are the parts a seller would rather not lead with. A publisher that states them as plainly as the upside is not writing to convert.
Does the disclosure name anything?"We may earn a commission from some links" costs nothing to write and tells you nothing. A disclosure that names the partner, the network and the pages can be checked, and can be shown to be wrong.
Does the site publish its mistakes? A publisher with a public corrections record has accepted a cost for being wrong. One without a corrections page has not — which does not mean it never errs, only that you will not be told when it does.
Applied to this page: one of two links, both to the same retailer, named above; the metals pages state premiums and spreads; and the corrections page is public. Hold us to the same four questions you would hold anyone else to.
9. What we turn down
We are approached regularly with offers that we do not accept, and it is more useful to say which than to claim general virtue. We decline paid guest posts and link insertions into existing articles. We decline arrangements conditional on a minimum ranking or a positive verdict. We decline products we would not be willing to explain the risks of on the same page. And we decline anything where the disclosure would have to be softened to make the deal work — if a partner objects to the word "Affiliate link" appearing beside their link, there is no deal.
Anyone wanting to propose a commercial relationship can read the terms on the advertise page before writing.
10. No personalised advice, linked or not
Whether or not a link earns us anything, nothing on Vextor Capital is personalised financial, investment, tax or legal advice. Vextor Capital is not registered with the SEC, FINRA, CFTC or FCA and is not authorised as an investment firm under MiFID II. Precious metals in particular carry costs that a price chart does not show — dealer premiums, storage, insurance, and the spread between buying and selling. Read the full risk disclosure before acting on anything here, partner-linked or not.
11. Why precious metals, and not the categories that pay better
The obvious question about a disclosure listing two links is why there are not more. Affiliate income in personal finance is concentrated in a few categories — brokerage accounts, cryptocurrency exchanges, credit cards, and lending — and the commissions there are an order of magnitude larger than anything a coin dealer pays.
Those categories are also where the conflict is sharpest. A page that recommends a broker while earning a few hundred euro per funded account is being asked to hold two positions at once, and the pressure does not show up as an obvious lie: it shows up as the risk warning moved lower, the competitor quietly dropped from the comparison, the fee mentioned once instead of twice. We write about brokers, exchanges and credit products because readers need to understand them. Earning per signup on the same pages would make everything else on this site harder to believe, and we would rather keep the credibility than the revenue.
Precious metals sit at the other end. The link is a retailer of physical coins and bars, placed below the LBMA benchmark price and the section explaining dealer premiums, storage costs and the buy-sell spread — the three things that make physical metal expensive to hold and awkward to exit. It sits next to the case against, not in place of it. That is the test we apply: if disclosing honestly would kill the deal, the deal was not one we should have taken.
12. If you think we have got this wrong
If you find an affiliate link on this site that is not marked, a partner we earn from that is not named on this page, or a page where the commercial relationship seems to have shaped the wording, tell us through the contact page. We treat it as a factual error, fix it, and record what changed on the corrections page with the old wording next to the new — the same way we handle a wrong tax threshold or a misattributed figure.
It is worth saying what would count as us getting it wrong, so the invitation is not empty. An unlabelled affiliate link would count. A partner earning from us but absent from this page would count. A page where the risks were stated less fully because a commercial link sat on it would count, and so would a comparison that omitted a better option that pays nothing. None of those requires proving intent — if the page reads that way, the page needs changing regardless of how it came to be written.
One thing this page does not promise is that the arrangement will never grow. It may: a publisher with no revenue eventually stops publishing. What it promises is that the list above stays complete, that the marking stays visible and machine-readable, and that the disclosure gets written before the link goes live rather than after someone notices. Those are commitments you can check on any given day, which is the only kind worth making.