About Lantern Review

What this is

Lantern Review covers retail brokers that accept residents of South Africa. Each broker has a file with the entity that would actually onboard you, the licence behind that entity, the cost of a round turn, the withdrawal terms and the platforms, and each of those figures is stored with the sentence it was read from. On top of the files sit comparison pages for the things people actually filter on, and a single score per broker whose arithmetic is published in full on the methodology page.

The base

South Africa is one country in a larger measured base: 1,521 broker-country pairs across 20 countries, covering 324 distinct brokers. The same formula and the same rules about missing data are used in all of them, which is what makes a figure in one country comparable to the same figure in another.

A pair is one broker measured for one country, because the answer is different in each: the entity that signs a client, the leverage cap, the licence and often the pricing all change at the border.

Who it is for

Readers in South Africa deciding where to open an account, and readers who already have one and want to check what they actually signed. Every figure here is the one that applies to a client onboarded from South Africa; where only a worldwide figure exists, it is labelled as such instead of being passed off as local. The local regulator is FSCA (Financial Sector Conduct Authority).

Who writes it

The Lantern Review editorial team - a writer, an editor and a fact-checker - working to the rules on the editorial policy page. We sign by the team and not by a personal byline: who makes this site explains why, and what we do put on a page instead.

What this is not

Not a broker and not an introducer: we do not hold funds, do not open accounts and do not pass your details to anyone. Not financial advice: nothing here takes your circumstances into account. We earn a commission when a reader opens an account through one of our links, which is set out on the affiliate disclosure page and does not affect any score or any order.

CFDs are complex instruments and carry a high risk of losing money rapidly because of leverage.