I recently started trading futures, after 2 years of trying to trade options. My feeling now is that options is for suckers (Time Decay! ). Futures is a welcome relief, from all the S.E.C. rules as well as Time Decay. That includes Single Stock Futures on Nasdaq stocks as well as E-mini futures. Anyhow, I'm from Boston. Here's an interesting site for hooking up with other people locally about any interest subject: www.meetup.com It seems to be a fairly new site, though and so far the investing category only has about 100 members, but I bet that will grow.