Once you have been here for a while, you start to realise that almost all the good traders who were once here are gone, the topics in the trading forum are the same day in and day out. I have made my contacts with the traders i want to talk to and i talk to them on a daily basis, just not on this forum anymore. I have tried going on to some more civil politics forums, and there are 3 reasons i keep coming back here to discuss politics. The first one is exactly what you said, believe it or not there are actually quite a few intelligent people who frequent the politics forums of this site, and quite a wide variety of views, from people all over the world, because they came here at first to discuss trading. Second reason is because when you go to a new forum, you have to figure out who all the different people are and get an idea for their views and background, this can take months if not a couple years to get a good bead on how most of the main people really think. I have already put in 8 years coming to this site, though the first four i stuck to just talking trading, and learning. The third reason is because the overall layout of this site is by far the best for any internet forum i have been to, baron did a bang up job creating this site as opposed to most of the other forums out there. He takes alot of shit from people wanting to change the site in their own way but i can not honestly think of another forum i have been to which i think is laid out as well as this. The T2W boards are just a bunch of rookies stroking each others egos who have no clue what they are doing, granted the majority of this board is the same but there is still enough decent traders here lurking in the background to call out the bullshit when they see it. On the T2W boards they generally dont seem to allow dissenting views on peoples threads, which kills honest debate.