Affiliate Disclosure Rules for Promoting Trading Products

Almost every guide to affiliate marketing devotes one line to compliance: "remember to disclose." That line is worse than useless, because it leaves people believing the words affiliate link somewhere on the page are enough. According to the agency that writes the rules, they aren't.

This is the boring half of affiliate marketing, and it's the half that decides whether you're still doing it in a year. Trading products sit in the most heavily restricted category on nearly every advertising platform, and the enforcement risk here isn't theoretical — it's a suspended account, a removed video, or a program dropping you.

This is not legal advice. It's a plain-language summary of published rules with links to the primary sources, written for someone promoting a trading course. Your obligations depend on where you and your audience are, and if real money is involved, get advice from someone qualified to give it.

The rule underneath all the rules

Every disclosure requirement in every jurisdiction comes down to the same principle: if you have a financial reason to recommend something, the person reading has to know that before they act on it.

In the US that's codified in the FTC's Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255), which were substantially revised in 2023. The trigger isn't payment specifically — it's a "material connection," which covers commissions, free access, discounts, gifts and personal relationships alike. If you got the course free in exchange for a review, that's disclosable. If you're in the seller's Discord and they're a friend, that can be disclosable too.

The thing to internalise: the standard is what the reader understands, not what you technically stated somewhere. That's why so many disclosures fail despite existing.

The wording that fails

This is where most people get caught, and the FTC has been unusually specific about it.

• "Affiliate link" on its own is not adequate. The FTC's own guidance says the phrase doesn't reliably convey to an ordinary consumer that you get paid.
• "Commissionable link" is not adequate. Explicitly named as insufficient — it's jargon.
• A "Buy Now" button is not a disclosure. Obviously, but people treat the presence of a button as implying commerce.
• "Paid link" placed right next to the link is acceptable, provided the reader can see the recommendation and the disclosure at the same time.

The plainer you go, the safer you are. Something like "I earn a commission if you buy through this link" is unambiguous, and there's no prize for being subtle. A disclosure that makes you slightly uncomfortable to write is usually the correct length.

Where it has to sit

The 2023 revision tightened the definition of "clear and conspicuous" to mean unavoidable — the reader must not have to click, expand, scroll or hover to find it. That kills several habits at once:

• A disclosure on a separate "Disclosure" page linked in your footer. Nobody clicks it. It doesn't count for a specific recommendation.
• A disclosure in your bio when the link is in a post. Different surface, different moment.
• A disclosure below the "…more" cut-off on a YouTube description or a long social post.
• A disclosure at the end of a 3,000-word review when the link is in paragraph two.

The workable rule is proximity: put it where the recommendation is, so both are visible together. If your article links to a product in four places, the disclosure belongs near the top and it's cheap to repeat it near the link that actually converts.

Platform by platform, in practice:

Surface	Where the disclosure goes
Blog post or review	Above the first link, in body text — not a footer, not a sidebar widget
YouTube	Spoken and on screen early in the video, plus the platform's paid-promotion toggle. The description alone is not enough
Reddit / forums	In the comment itself, in the same breath as the link. Check the subreddit's own rules too — many ban affiliate links outright regardless of disclosure
X / short posts	In the post. There's no room to be clever; "paid link" costs ten characters
TikTok / Instagram	On-screen text plus the platform's branded-content tool. Audio-only disclosure fails for muted viewers
Discord	In the message with the link, and check the server rules — most trading servers require permission to post any link
Email	In the body near the link, not in the footer boilerplate

Note that platform tools — YouTube's paid-promotion checkbox, the branded-content toggles — are additional, not a substitute. They satisfy the platform's terms. They don't necessarily satisfy the FTC's standard on their own.

Earnings claims: the rule that surprises people

This one matters more than disclosure for anyone promoting a trading product, and it's routinely got wrong.

The old approach was to make a big claim and bolt on a disclaimer: "members have made $10k in a month — results not typical." The FTC removed that safe harbour when it revised the Endorsement Guides, and reaffirmed the position in the 2023 update. Its reasoning is that consumers still take the impressive number as representative, and it has said it has not seen evidence that such disclaimers actually cure the impression. Courts have repeatedly agreed.

The practical consequence for a trading affiliate: you cannot fix an unrepresentative results claim with small print. If you present an outcome as what someone can expect and it isn't typical, the disclaimer doesn't save it. The FTC has also had a dedicated rulemaking effort on deceptive earnings claims since 2022, aimed squarely at money-making opportunities.

So the safe posture, and honestly the more persuasive one:

• Describe what the product is and teaches — that's verifiable.
• Describe the commission structure if you're recruiting other affiliates — a rate is a fact.
• Never state or imply what anyone will earn, from trading or from promoting.
• Don't post account screenshots as evidence, yours or anyone else's.
• Don't use "typical" language you can't substantiate with actual data on typical results. If you don't have that data, you can't make the claim.

This is exactly why the affiliate commission calculator is framed as arithmetic on numbers you enter rather than a projection. Multiplying a price by a rate is maths. Telling someone what they'll make is a claim.

Paid ads: mostly closed, and you should know why

Here's the part that changes people's plans.

Google's advertising policy on complex speculative financial products covers CFDs, spread betting and rolling spot forex. It restricts not just brokers but destinations providing "signals for the trading of complex speculative financial products" — and the policy explicitly names "affiliate sites containing related content or broker reviews." Advertisers need Google's certification as a licensed provider or aggregator, per target country.

Read that again if you're planning a Google Ads campaign to a trading review site: you are the example in the policy. Certification exists for licensed financial firms; an individual affiliate promoting an educational course is not the entity that policy was designed to approve.

Meta is fuzzier but pointed in the same direction — its financial products and services standards require verification and authorisation for various financial promotions, and ads that read as trading or earnings opportunities get pulled routinely even when the underlying product is educational. Google has also been steadily expanding financial-services advertiser verification into new markets through 2026, so the direction of travel is clear.

The practical conclusion isn't "find a workaround." Cloaking a destination or misrepresenting what you're advertising is a policy violation that ends in a permanent ban, and it's the reason so many affiliate accounts die in month two.

The conclusion is that organic is the channel — which is what How to Promote a Trading Course Without an Audience is entirely about. Being genuinely useful in the places traders already gather isn't the scrappy option here. It's the only one that's actually open.

Outside the US

The FTC standard is the one most affiliates encounter, because platforms tend to build their rules around it and because so much of the audience is American. It isn't the only one.

The UK, EU, Canada and Australia all have consumer-protection regimes covering undisclosed paid endorsements, and several have specific guidance for influencer marketing. Financial promotion rules are a separate question again, and whether they bite depends on whether what you're promoting counts as a regulated investment — an educational course generally sits differently from a broker or a signals service, but "generally" is doing real work in that sentence.

The honest advice: disclose to the strictest standard that applies to any part of your audience and you'll almost never have a problem. Then check your own jurisdiction's guidance rather than assuming the US rules travel.

A disclosure you can actually use

Short, plain, and placed above the first link:

Disclosure: I'm an affiliate for this course and earn a commission if you buy through my link. It doesn't change what you pay.

Two things make it work. It says commission rather than "affiliate," and it says it before the recommendation instead of after. Add the last sentence only if it's true of your program — for the CRTLAB program it is, since the commission comes out of the seller's revenue rather than being added to the price.

If you're building out a set of posts, the angles in the affiliate resources page are written to be adapted rather than pasted — which is itself a compliance point, since identical copy repeated across platforms is treated as spam by both algorithms and moderators.

Before you promote anything, check these five

1. Does the program's own agreement restrict anything? Brand bidding on paid search, coupon sites and unsolicited email are commonly prohibited even where the law permits them. How the Whop affiliate program works covers the mechanics of the platform most trading courses run on.
2. Does the platform you're posting on allow affiliate links at all? Many subreddits and Discord servers don't, and disclosure doesn't override a house rule.
3. Is your disclosure visible without clicking, expanding or scrolling?
4. Have you implied an outcome anywhere? Read your own copy hunting for it. "Life-changing," "finally profitable" and "I made back the cost in a week" are all earnings claims wearing a disguise.
5. Would you be comfortable if the reader saw the commission figure? If not, the disclosure isn't strong enough. This is the test that catches everything the other four miss.

The part that's genuinely in your interest

None of this is red tape you're tolerating for someone else's benefit. Undisclosed promotion is the single fastest way to lose a trading audience, because those communities are unusually alert to it and unusually unforgiving once they spot it. Disclosure early reads as confidence. Disclosure discovered later reads as deception, and no rate is worth that.

The affiliates who last are the ones who could hand a regulator their entire posting history without flinching — and, not coincidentally, the ones whose recommendations people actually trust.

If you want the commercial side alongside this, the CRTLAB affiliate program pays 60% per sale with the full terms — rate, attribution window, refund clawback and payout mechanics — stated on the page rather than behind a signup, and Best Trading Affiliate Programs covers how to judge one against the alternatives.

FAQ

Do I legally have to disclose affiliate links? In the US, yes — the FTC's Endorsement Guides require disclosure of any material connection between an endorser and a seller, and a commission is a material connection. Most other major jurisdictions have equivalent consumer-protection rules. Beyond the law, essentially every platform's own terms require it too.

Is writing "affiliate link" enough? No. The FTC's guidance says that phrase alone is not adequate, and it explicitly rejects "commissionable link" as well. "Paid link" placed adjacent to the link is acceptable, and something plainer — "I earn a commission if you buy through this link" — is safer still.

Where exactly should the disclosure go? Where the reader will see it at the same time as the recommendation, without clicking, expanding or scrolling. That means above the first link in an article, in the message on Reddit or Discord, and both spoken and on screen early in a video. A footer page, a bio, or text hidden behind a "more" cut-off does not satisfy it.

Does a "results not typical" disclaimer make an earnings claim safe? No. The FTC removed that safe harbour when it revised the Endorsement Guides and reaffirmed the position in 2023, on the basis that consumers still read the impressive figure as representative. If you can't substantiate what results are typical, don't present a result at all.

Can I run Google Ads to a trading affiliate offer? Realistically, no. Google's complex speculative financial products policy restricts destinations providing trading signals or information and names "affiliate sites containing related content or broker reviews" directly. It requires certification as a licensed provider or aggregator in each target country, which an individual affiliate promoting a course will not obtain.

Who is responsible if the disclosure is wrong — me or the seller? Both can be. The FTC's guides address advertisers and endorsers alike, and platforms enforce against whoever's account posted the content. Assuming the program will cover you is a bad bet, and any program telling you disclosure is optional is telling you something useful about itself.

Do the rules apply if I'm not in the US? US rules apply where you're reaching a US audience, and most other major markets have their own equivalents. The practical approach is to disclose to the strictest standard that applies to any part of your audience, then check the specific guidance for where you're based — particularly on anything touching financial promotion.

Can I still say the course is good? Yes, and you should — an honest, specific opinion is the whole value of an endorsement. What you can't do is imply a financial outcome or hide that you're paid when someone acts on it. Describing what the course teaches and why it helped you is a claim about content, which you can substantiate. Describing what it will earn someone is a claim about results, which you can't.