Sizing futures trades in a prop evaluation: points, ticks and contract limits

Educational only, not financial advice. Simulations and backtests are models, not promises. Check every rule with your own firm.

Futures evaluations give you a dollar drawdown, not a percentage, and contracts come in fixed sizes. One E-mini contract can be a sensible trade or a quarter of your whole drawdown, depending on the stop.

Dollars per point

Each contract moves a fixed number of dollars per index point. For four widely traded equity index contracts, from CME Group’s contract specifications:

Source: CME Group contract specs for ES, MES, NQ and MNQ.

The sizing formula

contracts = risk in $ ÷ (stop in points × $ per point + costs per contract)

Round down, never up. Take a 50K evaluation with a $2,000 max loss and a plan to risk $200 per trade, a tenth of the drawdown:

• MNQ, 25-point stop: 25 × $2 = $50 per contract, so 4 contracts risk $200. If round-trip commission and a tick of slippage come to $1.50 per contract (use your own numbers), each costs $51.50 and $200 buys 3.
• NQ, same stop: 25 × $20 = $500 for a single contract, a quarter of the drawdown on one trade.
• MES, 8-point stop: 8 × $5 = $40, so 5 contracts risk $200. One ES contract with the same stop risks $400.

That’s the case for micros: they let you size in steps of a tenth, so the stop can sit where the trade needs it instead of where the contract size forces it.

Think in drawdown, not account size

"Risk 1% of the account" sounds careful, but on a 50K evaluation that’s $500, a quarter of a $2,000 drawdown. Four losses in a row reach the floor, and the fourth lands exactly on it, so you can survive only three. At $200 per trade you can take nine. Losing streaks of that length are common; see losing streaks in prop challenges. The risk-per-trade planner does the count for any limit.

Size from the room you have left

With an end-of-day trailing drawdown, the room is the distance from your balance to the current floor, not the original $2,000. Take Profit Trader’s rule, scaled to 50K: the floor starts at $48,000. Close day one at $51,000 and it moves to $49,000. If day two closes at $50,200, the floor stays at $49,000, and your room is now $1,200, not $2,000.

When the floor locks, the picture improves. At Take Profit Trader and Alpha Futures it stops trailing at the starting balance, and Lucid Trading locks it at $50,100 once the balance passes $52,100. From then on, extra profit adds to your room. The drawdown visualizer shows the floor on your own sequence of trades.

Contract caps

Every futures firm caps your size. On their 50K evaluations: 6 contracts at Take Profit Trader, 5 minis or 50 micros at My Funded Futures (Rapid) and Alpha Futures (Standard), and 4 minis or 40 micros at Tradeify (Select) and Lucid Trading. Bulenox’s EOD option starts at 2 contracts and scales to 4 and then 7 as your cash on hand grows; Earn2Trade’s TCP25 follows a progression ladder of up to 3.

If you size from the drawdown, you’ll rarely get near these caps. They matter in two cases: very tight stops on micros, and copying several accounts. Exceeding a cap is serious: Earn2Trade treats it as a hard fail, and My Funded Futures says it can breach the account.

A checklist

• Know your contract’s dollars per point, and your firm’s costs per contract.
• Set risk per trade as a fraction of the drawdown room, not the account size.
• Round down, and use micros when a mini is too large.
• Recheck your room after every close if the drawdown trails.
• Stay under the firm’s contract cap, including any scaling plan.

For forex and CFD lot sizes, see position sizing for prop challenges and the lot size calculator. For the rules side by side, see futures vs forex prop firm rules.