How brokers are checked

The first gate: can a Nigerian use it

The first question is whether a resident of Nigeria can open an account, fund it and get money back out. A broker that fails any of those three steps is not ranked highly, however good its platform looks. Funding is checked against the methods actually offered, such as local NGN bank transfers, Visa and Mastercard debit cards, e-payments and crypto.

Withdrawal is checked separately from funding, because money going in smoothly says nothing about money coming out. Where a broker serves Nigeria through an offshore entity, that is noted on the page rather than smoothed over, since the entity and the protections attached to it differ from the home licence.

Where the numbers come from

Numbers come from the broker's own documents, and each figure is recorded with the date it was read. Contract specifications, leverage terms, funding pages and legal documents are the sources, not rumour, forum posts or screenshots. If a broker does not publish a figure, the page says so instead of filling the gap.

Where sources conflict, the page says that too. Leverage for Nigeria is a clear example: the maximum available is stated as up to 1:200 via the offshore entity, while one review cited 1:30 or 1:20 caps, and that conflict is not verified. Any leverage figure is a cap, not a setting to aim at.

The known limits of how this site reaches its numbers

The biggest limit is that we were not given spread, commission, swap or minimum deposit figures, so no calculator here can tell you your true cost of trading. You can compute margin, pip value and gross profit or loss precisely from the facts we hold, but the net result after costs is a range you have to fill in from your own broker statement. A worked example is a check on your arithmetic, not a forecast of your account.

The second limit is entity drift. The leverage cap of up to 1:200 applies via the offshore entity that serves Nigeria, and one review cited 1:30/1:20 caps, which conflicts and was not verified at review. That means the single most consequential input to the margin calculator is the least settled fact on the page. If your account is opened under a different arrangement, your margin requirement changes and our $85.50 example no longer describes your position.

The third limit is price. The 4275.0 reference price is a fixed anchor for teaching the arithmetic, not a live quote, so every naira or dollar figure derived from it is illustrative. Gold moves, and a margin figure computed at one price stops matching your screen the moment the market shifts. Treat every number here as a method you can re-run with your own inputs, and treat the method, not the output, as the thing worth trusting.

What the site does when two sources contradict each other

When two sources disagree, the site shows both and labels the disagreement rather than picking a winner. The leverage cap is the working example: up to 1:200 via the offshore entity serving Nigeria, against one review citing 1:30/1:20 caps, conflicting and not verified at review. We do not average them, we do not round toward the more attractive figure, and we do not quietly drop the inconvenient one. The reader gets the conflict, the status of each side, and the instruction to confirm with the broker.

The tie-break rule is that a dated primary document beats a secondary description, and an undated claim beats nothing at all. Where the broker's own documentation states the entity and the platform list, that is the primary layer. Where a review gives a different leverage figure without verification, it is recorded as a flagged secondary source. Neither is deleted, because the existence of the conflict is itself information: it tells you this input is unsettled and should be checked before you rely on it.

Where the disagreement cannot be resolved at all, the number is withheld and the dependency is described instead. That is why no spread, commission, swap or minimum deposit appears anywhere on the site: we were not given figures we could stand behind, so we describe what the cost consists of and what it depends on. A blank with an explanation is more honest than a number with no source, and it keeps the margin and pip calculators anchored to facts that were actually supplied.

Which figures update on their own and which a person checks

The reference price and any figure derived directly from it update automatically, because they are pure arithmetic on a single input. Change the price to 4275.0 and the notional value, the pip value in dollars and the margin requirement all recalculate without anyone touching them. This is the safe class of automation: a formula applied to a stated input, where the output can be reproduced by hand in under a minute. Nothing in that chain depends on judgement.

Broker facts are reviewed by hand, never refreshed automatically. The entity serving Nigeria, the platform list, the funding methods and the leverage cap all come from documentation that can change without notice, and a scraper cannot tell a genuine update from a redesign. Each of those facts carries a date and is re-checked on a schedule, which is why the page can tell you when it was last confirmed. A hand check is slower, but it is the only way to catch a change that matters.

Anything we cannot verify stays out of the automated layer entirely. The conflicting 1:30/1:20 leverage note is a hand-written caveat, not a computed value, because two sources disagreed and no formula can settle that. The same applies to the regulator line: FxPro is licensed by the FCA in the UK, CySEC and the FSCA, and we tell you to confirm any broker on the SEC Nigeria register of capital market operators, which is a manual step by design. Automation handles arithmetic. People handle claims.

How a broker fact gets a date and a re-check interval

Every broker fact on the site is stored with the date it was last confirmed and the source it was confirmed against, and that date is what you see next to the claim. A fact without a date does not get published, because an undated claim about leverage or funding is indistinguishable from a guess. The date tells you how stale the statement might be, which is more useful than implying it is permanently true.

Re-check intervals depend on how much the fact can hurt you if it is wrong. Leverage caps, the serving entity and funding methods are checked most often, because a wrong margin figure can cause a real loss. Platform availability and general licensing statements are checked less frequently, since they change slowly. The regulator caveat is treated as standing guidance rather than a fact to refresh: confirm any broker on the SEC Nigeria register of capital market operators, because that register, not this page, is the authority.

When a re-check cannot confirm a fact, the fact is marked as unverified rather than silently kept. The leverage note is the clearest case: up to 1:200 via the offshore entity, with one review citing 1:30/1:20 caps that conflict and were not verified at review. We could have printed the friendlier number alone. Instead the conflict and its unverified status are both visible, so you can see exactly how much weight the figure will bear before you size a position on it.

The arithmetic behind every calculator on the site, described in words

Each calculator works in the same three steps: convert your position size into ounces, multiply by the price distance in dollars, then express the result in the currency you actually hold. A standard lot is 100 oz, so a 0.10-lot gold position is 10 oz. One pip on XAU/USD is 0.01, so a move of 100 pips is a move of $1.00 per ounce. Multiply ounces by dollars moved and you have the gross profit or loss in US dollars before any cost.

The margin calculator runs the same logic in reverse. Take the notional value of the position, which is ounces multiplied by the reference price, then divide by the leverage cap that applies to your account entity. At 1:200, a 0.10-lot position at the 4275.0 reference price carries roughly $85.50 of required margin. The result is a cap-driven figure, not a recommendation: leverage is a ceiling set by the entity, not a setting to aim at, and raising position size raises margin proportionally.

The pip-value and cost calculators separate what the market gives you from what the broker charges you. Pip value is ounces multiplied by 0.01, converted to naira at whatever rate applies on the day. Costs are not calculated as a number here, because we were not given spread, commission or swap figures. Instead the calculator names the components that make up the cost and the variables it depends on, such as instrument, session and holding period, so you know what to ask the broker rather than what to assume.

The limits of the testing

The testing is documentary and limited. The desk reads what a broker publishes and checks it against what a Nigerian user is told, but it does not run live money through every account type, and it cannot see the price a broker fills at on a busy news day. Execution quality, slippage and support speed are described in terms of what they depend on, never as a measured number.

Nothing here is a guarantee that a broker behaves the same way next month. Terms, entities and funding routes change, so a figure carries the date it was read and should be checked against the broker's current documents before you rely on it.

Where each class of figure on this site comes from

Every price, margin and contract figure on this site traces to one of three places: the instrument specification, the broker's own published documentation, or a worked example we calculate ourselves. The gold contract terms are fixed facts, not estimates: XAU/USD, one standard lot equals 100 oz, one pip equals 0.01, and the reference price used across the site is approximately 4275.0. Those are the numbers every other figure is built from, so they are the ones we state most plainly.

Leverage and margin figures come from the broker entity that actually serves Nigeria, FxPro Markets Direct Costa Rica Latam SRL. The maximum available is up to 1:200 via that offshore entity, and one review cited 1:30/1:20 caps, which conflicts and was not verified at review. We publish that conflict rather than smoothing it, because a reader who sees only one number would plan margin on the wrong basis. A 0.10-lot gold position at 1:200 needs about $85.50 margin, and that worked figure is ours, shown so you can check the arithmetic yourself.

Funding and platform facts come from the broker's own list: local NGN bank transfers, Visa and Mastercard debit cards, e-payments and crypto, across MT4, MT5, cTrader and FxPro Edge. Anything that would normally be a number, such as a spread, commission, swap rate or minimum deposit, is deliberately left as a description of what the cost consists of and what it depends on. We were not given those figures, so we do not print them. Where a figure has no source in that chain, it does not appear on the site at all.