Thought this might be relevant to this thread, I was looking for the best forex broker and I came across this article ...

http://www.gracecheng.com/forex_trad...x_Brokers.html

Learned about the difference between Market Makers and ECN's. After reading this and looking into it further I'm probably going to end up going with an ECN like EFX Group, even though it's not compatible with MT4 and they're charting packages & interfaces are pretty lame.

BUT ... ECN's make so much more sense in the long run because of the much lower cost per trade compared to the Market Makers dealing desks, 3+ spreads and they're outrageous slippage. Hopefully, some reliable ECN's will offer MetaTrader soon, but until then I'm not going to waste 1 pip with a Market Maker just to use MetaTrader for live trading.