About Lantern Review

Lantern Review measures the brokers that onboard residents of South Africa and publishes the figures with their sources. Every number on the site comes from the same base of 104 broker records, each tied to the address it was read from and the date it was checked.

The site exists because the question a reader actually has — which firm will take me as a client here, under which licence, at what cost — is usually answered with adjectives. It is answerable with numbers.

What we do not cover: brokers that do not onboard South Africa residents, products outside retail trading, and anything we cannot source.

A broker enters the base when we can name the legal entity that would onboard a South Africa resident and point at a source for it. From there each figure is collected separately: the licence and its number, the entry terms, the cost of a round turn, the published withdrawal window, the rating on a public review platform and the year the firm was founded.

Figures that cannot be traced are not used. That is why the tables here have visible blanks: of 104 brokers, 60 have a price we could source and the rest do not, and a blank says so rather than implying a zero.

The whole base is recalculated at once, so two brokers are always compared on the same day's figures. Each page carries that date.

We are not a broker, an introducing broker or a money manager. We hold no client money, we cannot open or close an account for you, and we have no view on what you should trade.

Some links to brokers are partner links and are disclosed as such; they pay for the measurement work and change nothing about it.

Editorial: editorial@lantern-review.pages.dev
Corrections: corrections@lantern-review.pages.dev
Partners: partners@lantern-review.pages.dev

We answer corrections first and partner mail last. A correction that changes a ranking is applied before anything else that day.