How We Check a Broker Before Ranking It

The first gate: can a Ghanaian reader use it

A broker is only ranked here if a resident of Ghana can open an account, fund it and withdraw from it in practice. That means checking whether the entity serving this country accepts Ghanaian applicants, whether MTN Mobile Money is a supported funding route, and what the withdrawal process looks like on paper.

A broker that fails any part of that gate is not ranked lower; it is left out, because a ranking of a service you cannot use is noise. Where the answer depends on the reader's own documents or bank, we say that instead of guessing.

Where every figure on Kumasi Learn comes from

Instrument specifications on this site come straight from the exchange and contract standards for gold (XAU/USD): one standard lot equals 100 ounces and one pip equals 0.01 in price terms. The reference price shown, approximately 4275.0, is a snapshot used for illustration and is not a live quote. Margin examples, such as the roughly $85.50 needed for a 0.10-lot position at the applicable leverage cap, are calculated from the contract size and the cap that applies to the FxPro entity serving Ghana. None of these figures are borrowed from a broker's marketing page.

Broker facts, including the platforms offered (MT4, MT5, cTrader and the FxPro app) and the regulator caveat, are taken from the broker's own published legal and product documentation and from the regulator registers named in that caveat. The Ghana-specific caveat, that FxPro is licensed by the FCA (UK), CySEC and FSCA and that you should confirm any broker on the SEC Ghana licensed operators list, is reproduced as given. Funding methods listed, such as MTN Mobile Money, are those the broker states it accepts for Ghana; no deposit minimums or fees are stated because none were supplied to us.

Any cedi amount you see on the site is a conversion from a US-dollar figure using a rate we record at the time of writing; we do not present it as a live exchange rate. Leverage is described only as the cap that applies to the entity serving this country, never as a recommended setting. Where a number depends on your account currency, your broker's execution or the time of day, the page says so rather than inventing a figure. If a fact was not given to us, it is described in terms of what it depends on, not filled in with a guess.

What updates on its own and what a person checks

The reference price and the cedi conversion shown alongside examples are refreshed automatically from the data feed we record, so the illustrative price can move between visits. That automatic refresh is a convenience for orientation, not a trading signal; the page labels it as a reference and not a live broker quote. Nothing about your own account, your broker's spread or your available margin is pulled automatically, because we have no connection to your account and would not want one. If a number on the page looks stale, treat it as a snapshot and confirm it with your platform.

Broker facts are reviewed by hand. The platform list, the regulator caveat and the funding methods for Ghana are checked against the broker's published documentation and the regulator registers on a scheduled review, and the date of that review is recorded with the fact. A hand review means a person reads the source, compares it with what the page says, and changes the page only when the source has changed. We do not let an automated scraper rewrite a regulatory statement, because a mis-scraped licence line is worse than a slightly old one.

Leverage caps and instrument specifications are also hand-checked, since they change rarely and matter enormously. The gold contract size of 100 ounces and the pip size of 0.01 are treated as stable facts and re-verified when we revisit the instrument page. The margin example is recalculated by hand whenever the cap or the reference price changes, so the $85.50 figure is never left over from an older set of inputs. Anything that cannot be verified against a named source is not published, even if it would make the page read more smoothly.

When two sources disagree, the page says so

When two sources disagree, the page does not silently pick the friendlier one. It states the disagreement and names both sources, then tells you which one to trust for which purpose. For example, if a broker's marketing page and its legal documentation differ on which entity serves Ghana, the legal documentation and the regulator register take precedence, and the page says the marketing text was not used. If the SEC Ghana licensed operators list and a broker's own claim conflict, the list is treated as the authority for the licence question and the conflict is noted rather than smoothed over.

Disagreement on a number is handled by refusing to publish the number. If one source gives a leverage cap and another gives a different one, the page does not average them or choose the higher; it describes the cap as the one that applies to the entity serving this country and points you to the source to confirm. If a funding method appears on one page and not another, the page lists it only if the broker's own documentation for Ghana states it, and otherwise says the method could not be confirmed. A missing number is safer than a confident wrong one.

The same rule applies to dates and to the reference price. If our recorded price snapshot and a later check disagree, the later check replaces the snapshot and the example is recalculated, so the $85.50 margin figure is never left standing on an old price. If a regulator register is temporarily unavailable, the page keeps the last dated check and says the register could not be reached, rather than implying a fresh confirmation. Readers are told what was compared and what was not, so they can reproduce the judgment themselves.

The arithmetic behind each calculator, written out in words

The pip-value calculator multiplies three things: the pip size for gold (0.01), the number of ounces you are trading, and the conversion into your account currency. For a standard lot of 100 ounces, one pip move is 0.01 times 100, which equals 1.00 in the price currency, so a 0.10-lot position moves 0.10 in the price currency per pip. If your account is in cedis, that price-currency figure is then converted at the rate you enter; the calculator does not fetch a rate for you, so the output is only as current as the number you type.

The margin calculator divides the notional value of the position by the leverage cap that applies to the entity serving Ghana. Notional value is the contract size in ounces multiplied by the reference price; for 0.10 lots at approximately 4275.0, that is 10 ounces times 4275.0, or 42,750 in price-currency terms. Dividing by the applicable cap gives the margin requirement, which is why the worked example lands at about $85.50. The calculator treats the cap as a ceiling, not a target, and does not add any broker-specific margin buffer because no such buffer was supplied to us.

The position-size calculator works backwards from the risk you are willing to take. It takes your account balance, the percentage you are prepared to lose on the trade, and the distance in pips between your entry and your stop, then solves for the lot size that keeps the loss at that amount. In words: risk amount equals balance times risk percentage; pip value per lot equals 0.01 times 100 converted to your account currency; lot size equals risk amount divided by the product of stop distance in pips and pip value per lot. The output is rounded down to the nearest step your broker allows, and the page warns that slippage and gaps can make the real loss larger.

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

Every broker fact on the site carries the date it was last checked against a named source. For the regulator caveat, that source is the broker's own legal page plus the registers of the FCA (UK), CySEC and FSCA as named in the caveat, and for Ghana specifically the SEC Ghana licensed operators list. The date is the day a person compared the page text with those sources, not the day the page was published. If you cannot see a date next to a broker fact, treat it as unverified and check the source yourself before relying on it.

Re-checks happen on a set schedule and also whenever something prompts one: a reader query, a regulator notice, or a change on the broker's site. The check is a side-by-side read of the source and the page, with the page edited only if the source has changed. A fact that has been stable for a long time is still re-read rather than assumed, because licence status and accepted funding methods can change without fanfare. The date is updated after the read, so a recent date means a recent human check, not an automated ping.

The leverage cap and the instrument specification get the same dated treatment. The cap that applies to the entity serving this country is recorded as a cap, not a setting, and is re-checked when the broker's legal documentation changes. The gold contract size of 100 ounces and the pip size of 0.01 are re-verified alongside it. When a re-check finds no change, the date still moves forward, because the value of the date is that it tells you how long ago a person last looked. That is the only sense in which the page is ever 'up to date'.

Where the numbers come from

Every number we publish is taken from the broker's own documents, and we record the date we read them. Contract specifications, platform lists, leverage caps and funding pages are the sources; we do not fill gaps with estimates or with figures copied from another site.

Where a figure is not published, we describe what the cost consists of and what it depends on rather than inventing a number. The leverage we quote is the cap that applies to the entity serving Ghana, and it is a cap, not a setting to aim at. At that cap, a 0.10-lot gold position needs about $85.50 margin.

The limits we accept in this method

The method cannot tell you what your broker will actually charge or execute at. Spreads, commissions, swaps and minimum deposits are not stated on this site as numbers because none were supplied to us, and we will not invent them to fill a table. What a trade costs depends on the broker's own pricing, the time of day, the liquidity at that moment and your account type. The calculators therefore show mechanics, not a promise of cost. A reader who needs the real cost must read the broker's own schedule and their platform's live quote.

The reference price of approximately 4275.0 is an illustration, and gold moves. Any margin or pip-value figure derived from it will drift as the price moves, which is why the page tells you to recompute with the current price rather than trusting a stored example. The cedi conversions are only as good as the rate entered, and we do not present them as an official exchange rate. The method also cannot account for your broker's margin buffer, stop-out level or any change to the leverage cap that applies to the entity serving Ghana.

Testing is done on published facts and worked arithmetic, not on live funded accounts across every broker. We do not claim to have executed trades at every platform listed, and we do not rank brokers by spread because we have no measured spread to rank. Where a fact depends on the entity that serves Ghana, we say so and point you to the SEC Ghana licensed operators list rather than asserting a licence we cannot see. These limits are stated so you can judge how much weight to put on any figure, and so you know which numbers you must confirm yourself.

The honest limits of our testing

We do not run live money through every broker we write about, and we do not test every platform on every device. Our checks are documentary and comparative: what the broker states, what its own terms say about Ghana, and how those statements hold together across pages.

That means a page here can be right about the documents and still miss a reader's lived experience of a slow withdrawal or a support queue. If you hit something we did not, tell us at [email protected] and we will re-check the source and correct the page if it is wrong.