Micro futures contract specs: MES, MNQ, MGC and M2K

These are the numbers you need in your head before you place an order. Everything else — stops, position size, daily loss limits — is arithmetic on top of them.

All four are cash-settled or physically-referenced CME products traded on Globex, quoted in US dollars, and each index micro is one tenth the size of its E-mini equivalent. If you want the parent-versus-micro comparison in detail, read MNQ vs NQ and MES vs ES.

The default beginner product and the one I still trade most. $5 per index point, 0.25 tick, $1.25 per tick. A 10-point move is $50 on one contract. Liquidity around the US cash open is deep enough that the bid-ask is almost always one tick, which matters more than any spec line when you are scalping.

Expiry cycle: quarterly (March, June, September, December), referenced to the third Friday of the month. Roll into the new front month when volume shifts, generally a week before expiry.

$2 per point, 0.25 tick, $0.50 per tick. The cheap tick fools people: the Nasdaq routinely travels three to four times as far as the S&P in the same session, so a "normal" MNQ stop of 30 points is $60 — more dollar risk than a normal MES stop. Same quarterly expiry cycle as MES.

If you trade MNQ on a funded account, size it from the dollar stop, never from the contract count. The detail is in how to trade NQ futures.

10 troy ounces per contract, minimum tick of $0.10 per ounce, so $1.00 per tick and $10 for every full dollar the gold price moves. MGC is one tenth of the 100-ounce GC contract.

Gold's character is different from the indices: long quiet stretches, then violent expansion around inflation data and central bank commentary. Trading it on a trailing-drawdown account without cutting size into releases is how accounts die.

$5 per index point like MES, but a finer 0.10 tick worth $0.50. That makes M2K the cheapest of the four per tick, and it is the smallest-dollar way to express a US equity view. The trade-off is behaviour: small caps are choppier and the book is thinner than ES or NQ, so slippage on stop orders is more common. Quarterly expiry cycle.

Background on the index itself is in Russell 2000 futures.

Specs matter because they set your position size. Here are realistic stop distances converted into dollars per single contract — the number your prop firm's daily loss limit cares about.

On a $50,000 evaluation risking 0.25% per trade — $125 — that is roughly 3 MES, 2 MNQ, 3 MGC or 4 M2K contracts. Do that arithmetic before the session, not during it. The full framework is in how to pass a prop firm challenge.

The index and metal micros trade almost around the clock from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon US Central time, with a short daily maintenance break in the late afternoon and a brief pause before the equity index session close. Full breakdown, including which windows are actually worth trading, is in futures trading hours.

Two things people get wrong. First, your prop firm's flat-time is usually earlier than the exchange close — being open past it can auto-liquidate you or breach a rule. Second, holding a position across a roll means trading a contract that is losing liquidity. Move to the front month before it thins out.

Round-turn cost on a micro is exchange plus clearing plus your platform fee, and on a per-contract basis it is proportionally higher than on the E-mini. That does not matter to a swing trader and matters enormously to a scalper taking 20 trades a day on two contracts.

Before you commit to a micro-heavy scalping style, check what your prop firm's platform charges per side — micro futures trading covers the cost maths, and best futures prop firms lists which firms bundle data and platform costs.