You can’t size what you can’t price. Three small numbers per contract turn a chart level into dollars of risk — and mixing them up is how a “tight” stop quietly eats a chunk of your drawdown.
The three numbers that price every futures trade
Every sizing decision on a funded futures account runs through the same three specs:
- Tick size — the smallest increment the contract can move. ES ticks in 0.25 index points; crude oil ticks in $0.01 of price. It’s the market’s resolution.
- Tick value — the dollars one tick is worth per contract. This is what converts price movement into P&L.
- Point value — the dollars in one full point (or “handle”). It’s the tick value scaled up by how many ticks make a point.
The relationship is arithmetic: point value = tick value × (points per tick⁻¹). ES moves in 0.25-point ticks worth $12.50 each, so four ticks make a full point — $50. Learn these three per instrument and position sizing stops being a guess.
Equity index futures: ES and NQ
The U.S. equity-index contracts are the prop-trading core, and each has a 1/10-scale micro that shares the tick size but carries one-tenth the dollar weight.
- ES / MES (S&P 500): 0.25 tick. ES is $12.50 per tick / $50 per point; MES is $1.25 / $5.
- NQ / MNQ (Nasdaq 100): 0.25 tick. NQ is $5.00 per tick / $20 per point; MNQ is $0.50 / $2.
The trap here is assuming ES and NQ behave the same because they share a tick size. They don’t — NQ’s point is worth $20 against ES’s $50, and NQ’s daily range in points is much larger. A “20-point stop” means something very different on each.
Commodity futures: GC and CL
Commodities carry more dollars per point than the indices, which surprises traders arriving from ES.
- GC / MGC (Gold): 0.10 tick. GC is $10.00 per tick / $100 per point; MGC is $1.00 / $10.
- CL / MCL (Crude Oil): 0.01 tick. CL is $10.00 per tick / $1,000 per point; MCL is $1.00 / $100.
Crude is the one that catches people out. A “one-dollar” move in oil — a routine intraday range — is $1,000 per CL contract. A stop that sounds small in price terms is enormous in dollars, which is why most funded traders run MCL until their buffer can genuinely absorb full CL.
Quick reference table
| Contract | Tick size | Tick value | Point value |
|---|---|---|---|
| ES / MES (S&P 500) | 0.25 | $12.50 / $1.25 | $50 / $5 |
| NQ / MNQ (Nasdaq 100) | 0.25 | $5.00 / $0.50 | $20 / $2 |
| GC / MGC (Gold) | 0.10 | $10.00 / $1.00 | $100 / $10 |
| CL / MCL (Crude Oil) | 0.01 | $10.00 / $1.00 | $1,000 / $100 |
These are the standard CME specifications, but the exchange revises listings and occasionally adjusts contracts, so confirm the current spec on the CME product page or in your platform’s contract details before you size a live trade.
Why these specs are identical for everyone
Here’s the structural point worth internalizing: an ES contract is exchange-listed and standardized. There is one ES, one spec, one central order book, and your fill prints against the same book as every other participant. Nobody’s “ES” has a different point value than yours.
Contrast that with a CFD labelled “US 500” or “Gold.” A contract-for-difference carries whatever tick and point value the provider defines — often deliberately fractional so you can trade very small notional. That fractional sizing is a genuine, legitimate benefit: it lowers the entry bar and lets you scale in tiny increments. But it also means the number isn’t universal — two providers’ gold CFDs can price and step differently, and the quote is the dealer’s, not a shared exchange book. For a funded futures trader, the standardized, transparent spec is part of what you’re paying for.
From specs to dollars of risk
Once you know point value, per-contract risk is one multiplication:
Risk per contract = stop distance (points) × point value.
- 8-point stop on ES: 8 × $50 = $400.
- 30-point stop on MNQ: 30 × $2 = $60.
- $0.40 stop on MCL: 0.40 × $100 = $40.
To find how many contracts fit a fixed dollar risk, flip it: contracts = dollar risk ÷ risk per contract — and round down, never up. The futures contract calculator does this across every contract above and is built for sizing in micros, while the position size calculator keeps it consistent across instruments. Expressing each result as an R-multiple then lets you compare a crude trade against a Nasdaq trade on one scale.
Whichever instrument you trade, only your own tracked fills tell you what actually works — Shibiki auto-journals every one and reads it back as live edge health, and it can push a hard per-contract risk limit to the broker so an order that would exceed your per-trade dollars simply won’t send.
Related: Futures contract calculator · Position size calculator · R-multiple