The brokerage account was the easy part for me. actually all is very easy provided you get the clearance from SARS, it seems you normally just need to provide identification in form of a valid passport to the brokers you want to open an account with, in the case of USA you need to fill out a US Treasury form for foreign investors, but these guys works so well that nothing is a problem at all. again i dont know how UK will be, some US firms dont do business with SA, e.g. Chase (division of JPMChase) as we considered restricted, others have minimum limited, but others have no problem. it all depends on the service provider i guess.