Execution, advice, custody and the boundary you should never let blur.
A stockbroker is your licensed gateway to the Nigerian Exchange — and knowing exactly where their job starts and stops protects both of you.What a broker does: execute your buy and sell orders, hold accounts through which settlement flows, and maintain records of your trades. Licensed brokers are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that licence is checkable — ask for it, then verify it.
What many brokers also do is advise: recommend stocks, publish research, propose portfolios. Advice is a regulated activity too, and the honest version comes with reasoning you can interrogate, disclosures about conflicts, and an admission of uncertainty. Be wary of the broker who only ever calls with hot tips and certainty.
What no broker may do is guarantee outcomes. A promise that a stock “cannot fail,” or pressure to move money before you have understood the trade, crosses from service into misconduct. The same applies to trading your account without written discretionary authority.
Custody deserves special care. Your shares are held at the central depository in your name; a broker collapsing is not supposed to cost you your holdings, but messy mandates and unclaimed dividends are real administrative pain. Keep your own records, confirm statements, and reconcile them against your CSCS position.
Use brokers for what they are: licensed, accountable execution professionals. Keep the judgement — and, where the sums matter, the engagement of an independent licensed adviser — on your side of the line.