el caballo:
I've been demo'ing with EFX for about 6 months now, so I'm pretty familiar with their platform. I also have a live Oanda account.
I'm in Melbourne yeah, and they only offer USD account denomination at the moment. There was talk of them offering other currencies and apparently it wasn't too far off but has been put on the back burner yes. EFX are pretty much the best ECN broker for the small retail trader - they only require $400USD as an initial account deposit. You're best to look at the EFX group threads on here and on Forexfactory where your questions have been asked and answered a few times.
I plan to open a live account with them and start trading with them in the new financial year so I won't be able to answer many of the customer-related questions until then (again, check the EFX group threads). I have dealt with the customer support whilst on demos a few times - their demo platform is also their developer's test platform so the performance is somewhat flakey and I've had to ask to get orders that have got stuck cleared etc. Very prompt and they appear to treat demo 'customers' in the same way as live ones.
I've been back on Oanda recently, but have only been scalping EUR/USD (which has a fixed 0.9 spread) or EUR/JPY (2-2.3). I originally started scalping AUD/JPY with them back about 4-5 months ago (4 pip spread) but I was still at the stage where I was jumping in all over the place trying to maximise the pips - and ended up eroding 20% of my account (eh, I only chucked $100 in to start, but irrespective of the dollar amount, losing 20% of your account is still a big deal). So I'm sticking to using 25%-50% (depending on the probability) of my account balance in lot size and am slowly coming back up to break even.
Now though, 4-5 months on, I'm only trading big movements - it comes from learning specific currency pairs and well... more overall trading experience.
I wouldn't recommend scalping with Oanda as they have the same order types as you mention IG do (buggar all), I wouldn't focus on limit orders exclusively however. Market is fine when you jump on a big move - the spread becomes a care factor less than 1!
lbradman:
depends on the pair - the big 3 XXX/USD pairs (GBP, EUR and AUD) are frequently between 0-1 pip spread - especially EUR and it's very easy - even on market - to get in with buggar all spread. EUR/JPY is the same. AUD/JPY can on occasion do it and is invariably a sign of a surge in either direction - this is actually one of my signals to get in on a trade.
And no, I don't insist on 0 spread for my entries (you'd be waiting a long time lol!), I'm looking for bigger movements generally, so yeah, I'll enter on 2-3 pips on AUD/JPY if the momentum's building behind it. The only time I'd go the aggressive route and try and take 1 or 2 pips here or there is actually on EUR/USD exclusively on Oanda. The pair can bounce in a 5 pip range in slow times and it's quite easy to get 2-3 pips when its fixed spread is 0.9.
cheers