Affiliate Disclosure

Last updated: June 2026

The Short Version

Some links on this website are affiliate links. If you click one and sign up or make a purchase, we may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. We only partner with services we use ourselves and would recommend regardless of compensation.

Why We Disclose

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Union both require clear disclosure of affiliate relationships. We go beyond the minimum requirement because our credibility depends on you trusting that our recommendations are based on actual experience, not just commission rates.

Our Current Affiliate Partners

InvestingPro (by Investing.com)

Our primary fundamental analysis tool for fair-value calculations, financial modeling, and stock screening. We use InvestingPro daily for the deep-dive analyses published on this site. Visitors who sign up via our link receive an additional discount on top of standard pricing.

Debitum Investments

European P2P lending platform for diversified short-duration loan exposure. We hold a personal position and disclose performance in portfolio updates. Affiliate compensation does not influence our risk assessment of the platform.

Airalo

eSIM provider for international travel. Useful for investors traveling for shareholder meetings, site visits, or research trips. We use Airalo personally and link to it as a practical recommendation, not core investment infrastructure.

Wise (formerly TransferWire)

Multi-currency account for low-cost international transfers and currency exchange. Essential for European investors holding USD/CAD/GBP-denominated dividend stocks. We use Wise to receive and convert foreign-currency dividends.

What We Do NOT Do

• No paid placements. No company has ever paid for a positive review or analysis on this site.
• No undisclosed sponsorships. If we ever produce sponsored content, it will be clearly marked as such at the top of the article.
• No commission-driven recommendations. Our brokers (Scalable Capital, Trade Republic) on the German site are not promoted on the English site because they are not relevant to US/UK readers — even though they pay higher commissions than some alternatives.

How We Choose Partners

1. We use it ourselves first. No exceptions.
2. It must serve our audience. A tool useful only for German residents does not get an English-site affiliate link.
3. The economics must work for the user. If signing up via our link gives the user no benefit (no discount, no bonus), we still link to the service but do not push it heavily.

How to Identify Affiliate Links

Affiliate links on this website are marked with rel="sponsored" in the HTML and are typically accompanied by a transparency notice. We strive to be transparent about which links are affiliate links and which are not.

How Affiliate Revenue Funds Free Research

MB Capital Strategies Global publishes all research, sector analysis and portfolio commentary entirely free of charge. There is no paywall, no email wall and no subscription required to read any article on this site. The calculators — dividend snowball, yield-on-cost, DRIP, shipping cashflow and five others — are free to use without registration.

This is only possible because a small percentage of readers sign up for the tools or services we link to via affiliate relationships. In practical terms: if 100 readers read a shipping analysis and three of them later sign up for InvestingPro via our link, those three conversions subsidise the research for the other 97. That is the economic model. We believe it is honest and sustainable, as long as we never let the affiliate tail wag the editorial dog.

The site does not carry banner advertising beyond Google AdSense — which does not influence our editorial content in any way. We do not accept direct ad placements from listed companies, fund managers or broker-dealers. This keeps our incentive structure clean: we earn from reader utility (clicking a tool they find valuable), not from corporate promotional budgets.

Editorial Independence: What It Means in Practice

Independence is easy to claim and hard to prove. Here is how it works on this site in concrete terms:

• Negative verdicts stand unchanged. If a shipping stock we analysed last year looked attractive at $12 and now trades at $7 with a deteriorating balance sheet, we update the article to reflect that and say so plainly. Affiliate relationships have never caused us to remove or soften a negative assessment.
• We track no portfolio positions in companies we earn affiliate income from. InvestingPro is software, not an investable security. Debitum is a loan platform, not a stock. This boundary avoids any conflict between editorial opinion and personal financial gain.
• Commission rates do not determine emphasis. Airalo pays a lower commission per conversion than some financial product affiliates. We link to it because it is genuinely useful for investors who travel internationally — not because the economics favour it.
• Sector analysis is not influenced by company outreach. We receive press releases and investor relations materials from shipping companies, miners and energy producers. These are used as data inputs — the same as any public filing — and do not result in editorial favour. We have turned down requests to remove critical commentary from analyses after companies objected.

What Hard-Asset Investors Should Know About Research Independence

The hard-asset dividend space — shipping, mining, pipelines, energy — is a niche where independent research is genuinely scarce. Most English-language financial media focuses on US large-cap growth stocks. Tanker operators listed on Oslo Bors or Norwegian shipping companies with complex dividend structures rarely receive thorough coverage from large editorial outlets.

This creates an information gap that MB Capital Strategies tries to fill. The risk is that underfunded independent research can become subtly influenced by the companies it covers, either through cosy investor relations relationships or through implicit pressure to maintain access. We are aware of this dynamic and try to guard against it in two ways:

1. Primary sources first. Every analysis starts with company filings — quarterly reports, annual reports, charter party disclosures, fleet schedules. No analysis is built primarily on press releases or IR presentations.
2. No access journalism. We do not seek off-the-record briefings from management, do not attend sponsored analyst days and do not accept travel paid for by companies we cover. This limits our access to colour commentary but keeps our analysis independent.

Regulatory Compliance: FTC, EU Directive, and UK ASA

This disclosure is designed to comply with the following regulatory frameworks:

• US FTC Guides (16 CFR Part 255): Material connections between endorsers and advertisers must be clearly disclosed. Our affiliate relationships constitute a material connection and are disclosed on every page that carries affiliate links via a footer notice, and in full on this page.
• EU Directive 2005/29/EC (Unfair Commercial Practices): Commercial intent must be transparent to consumers. Affiliate links that could constitute commercial communications are tagged with rel="sponsored" as per Google's guidelines and European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) best-practice recommendations.
• UK ASA CAP Code: Marketing communications must be obviously identifiable as such. While MB Capital Strategies Global is not a UK-registered entity, we apply the same standard of transparency to UK readers.

If regulations change or a new partnership raises disclosure questions we have not addressed here, we will update this page promptly. The "Last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent revision.

How We Evaluate Affiliate Partners

Not every inbound partnership request gets accepted. The following criteria determine whether a partner reaches this disclosure page.

• Personal use. The product or platform has to be something Marco actually uses or has used. Tools recommended without personal experience do not appear here. InvestingPro has been part of the research workflow since 2022. Debitum represents a real allocation in the portfolio. Airalo has been used on investor-related travel. Wise is the primary multi-currency account for international dividend receipts.
• Relevance to hard-asset investing. The platform must be directly useful to dividend investors who focus on shipping, mining, energy, or pipeline sectors. General consumer finance products, crypto exchanges, and CFD trading platforms are declined, regardless of commission rates.
• Honest fee disclosure. The partner must clearly disclose its fee structure to end users. We do not promote financial products where the cost structure is deliberately obscured.
• No lock-in pressure. Partners that require high-pressure sales tactics, auto-renewals with difficult cancellation, or punitive exit fees are not promoted here. Reader trust is worth more than the marginal commission from a product that generates complaints.
• Regulatory standing. Regulated financial platforms (brokers, investment tools) must hold appropriate licences in their operating jurisdictions. This is verified at onboarding.

New partnerships are added when a product meets these criteria and has been tested sufficiently to be recommended without reservation. Removals happen if a partner changes its product materially, raises concerns about its regulatory standing, or if our personal experience with it deteriorates.

Questions or Concerns?

If you have questions about a specific partnership or believe we have failed our disclosure standards, email mbcapitalstrategies@gmail.com. We take this seriously.

For investment-related legal information, see our Investment Disclaimer. For portfolio transparency, see the Portfolio page. For background on Marco Bozem's investor journey, see the About page.