Well i'm a new forex trader, and have only been in for maybe a week. The first thing I wanted to do was dd a broker that I would be comfortable putting money in the future. I found gftforex to be my number one choice for now, and will set up a demo soon. Regarding fxcm it has alot of advertising so it is hard to miss it, and a nice demo to lure you in. I have no experience with the real account, but after reading mostly negative reviews on various sites I decided to avoid them. To summarize other people's statements (I have no personal experience), fxcm trades against its customers and if you win they will switch your account to manual (I don't know what that means exactly) or tell you to leave (they reserve the right to not be your broker). Also they are rumored to be associated with refco, which was a broker scam that claimed bankruptcy and left their customers with nothing.
I have also heard fxcm was not always a scam and do not know how recently they have changed their practices. All brokers in general have high slippage during news releases, as well as greatly fluctuating spreads. Hope this helped.