The position you control
At 1:400, KES 10,000 of your own money controls a position of KES 4,000,000.
- 10,000 × 400 = 4,000,000
- Every 1% move = KES 40,000
- That is 4× your entire account
We do not sell forex, recommend brokers, or take money from them
Two things to check before you deposit with a forex broker
People find this page looking for forex analysis. We do not offer it, and we would rather say so than sell you something. What we can usefully tell you is the part brokers are least likely to lead with: whether they are licensed to take your money at all, and what the leverage they are advertising does to an account the size of yours.
1. Is the broker licensed by the CMA?
Under the Capital Markets (Online Foreign Exchange Trading) Regulations 2017, offering or marketing online forex trading to people in Kenya is reserved to firms the Capital Markets Authority has licensed. A broker running Kenyan ads, quoting KES deposits and offering M-Pesa funding is not licensed by virtue of any of those things.
The check costs nothing. Go to cma.or.ke, find the register of licensees, and look for the exact legal entity name — not the brand, not the app name, not the name on the Telegram group. If the entity is not on the register, the protections you are imagining do not exist.
Two follow-ups worth making while you are there. First, ask what happens to your deposit if the firm fails: the compensation arrangements retail traders assume exist in Kenya are not equivalent to those run by tier-1 regulators elsewhere, so confirm specifically what covers you rather than assuming something does.
Second, read the broker's own risk disclosure — the one they are required to publish rather than the one in the advert. The industry's own numbers say most retail accounts lose money. That figure is not a warning label someone added; it is the outcome the business model produces.
2. What 1:400 leverage does to KES 10,000
Leverage is advertised as buying power. It is more usefully read as how small a move it takes to end you.
The move that wipes you out
Your account is gone when the market moves 0.25% against you. Not 25%. A quarter of one percent.
- 1 ÷ 400 = 0.25%
- Major pairs routinely move several times that in a day
- Fees and spread get there before the market does
Why the cap is high here
Kenya's cap sits far above what tier-1 regulators allow retail traders, and those caps were lowered abroad because of measured retail losses.
- Confirm the current cap with the CMA — rules change
- A high cap is a permission, not a recommendation
- Nobody is obliged to trade at the maximum
None of the above is a view on whether any currency will rise or fall, and we will not give you one. It is arithmetic you can check yourself in ten seconds, which is exactly why it is worth more than a directional call.
The thing we would rather you did with the money
The reason this page exists is that people arrive at forex looking for a way out of a squeeze. That is the wrong end of the problem to attack with leverage. The money most Kenyans can actually recover is not sitting in a currency pair — it is leaking out of their own statement in amounts too small to notice individually.
Transaction charges, withdrawal charges, paybill charges, overdraft fees. Five shillings here, fifty-seven there, several hundred times a year. Nobody adds them up because adding them up is tedious. So we do it: upload a statement, get the total, and see which of them you can stop paying. It is a smaller number than a forex advert promises and it is real.
Find your real number instead
Upload an M-Pesa or bank statement and see what you paid in fees and charges over the period. Read-only, and we will never ask for your PIN.