How We Check a Broker

The first check: can a Kenyan resident actually use it

The first thing checked before any broker is ranked is whether a resident of Kenya can open an account, fund it and withdraw from it. A broker that cannot be used from here is not ranked at all, however good its platform looks on paper.

That means confirming the entity that serves this country, whether M-Pesa is accepted as a funding route or whether a card or bank transfer is required instead, and what currency the account is held in. We also read the withdrawal section of the broker's own documents, because a funding route that works in one direction only is a problem worth stating early.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on this site comes from the broker's own published documents, and we record the date we read them. Where a number is quoted, such as the margin figure for a 0.10-lot gold position at the applicable cap, it is tied to that dated reading rather than presented as permanent.

Where we do not have a number, we describe what the cost consists of and what it depends on instead of inventing one. Spreads, commissions, swaps and minimum deposits vary by account type, by entity and by market conditions, so we point at the document a reader should open rather than print a figure we cannot stand behind."},{"h2":"The limits of our testing

paras":["This desk does not deposit real client money across every broker and trade it for months, so our testing has limits and we say so. We read documents, compare what they say across entities, and check that the platform list and funding routes match what a Kenyan reader is told elsewhere on the page.

We cannot verify how quickly a specific withdrawal will land, because that depends on the broker's checks and the payment route on the day. We cannot promise a broker will behave the same next quarter either, which is why pages carry the date they were checked and get re-read rather than left to age quietly.