How we check financial information (South Africa)
The method behind every number on XM South Africa Guide: where it comes from, how it is dated, and what is never measured here.
Open an FxPro account →Three kinds of information, three different rules
Pages on this site mix three kinds of information, and each is handled differently. Broker terms (minimum deposits, leverage, dormant-account rules, competition conditions) are read from XM's own pages and its client agreement. Reader experience comes from published reviews, sampled by country. Research comes from academic papers on retail trading. A reader can tell which is which from the way it is written: terms carry a source and date, experiences carry a platform and a date, research carries a paper reference and an evidence level.
Broker terms: source, date, clause
A term is recorded with the exact page or document it came from, the date it was read, and, for the client agreement, the clause number. That record lives in the site's facts registry and is printed on the page in the facts strip and in the “Sources and verification dates” tables. When two pages of the broker disagree, the page says which one was used and why. When a page could not be reached, the term is marked as not captured instead of being copied from a third party.
Terms change. The check date tells the reader how old the reading is; the quarterly re-check and reader reports trigger a new reading.
Reader experience: how reviews are sampled
Review quotes come from a platform's public reviews filtered by the reviewer's country, collected on a stated date, and recorded as a sample with its size and star split. The site prints the size and the split so a reader can see how negative the sample is before reading the quotes. Quotes are chosen to show the recurring themes of the sample, not the best or worst review, and the ratings shown next to quotes roughly follow the sample's mix.
Counts such as “how many reviews mention withdrawals” are counts within that sample only. They are not a rate for all XM clients in South Africa, and the pages say so.
Research: quoted with its limits
When a page cites a study, it names the paper, states the evidence level assigned to it during research, and states how far the finding transfers to XM and to the leverage available in South Africa. A study on other markets or at much lower leverage is quoted as a caution, never as a measurement of this broker. Papers without a clear mechanism or practical implication are not quoted at all.
What this site does not measure
The site does not measure spreads, slippage, execution speed or withdrawal times. Those figures depend on the account, the time of day and the instrument, and a number without a method and a timestamp would mislead. Where a page mentions them, it says “variable” or points to the figure shown inside the trading platform. Worked examples (margin, pip value, rand conversions) use round illustrative prices that are labelled as illustrative.