Education · Stage 1 · 04
Minis and micros
The micro contract is one tenth of the mini: same index, same chart, same hours, a tenth of the money per point. What almost nobody says out loud is that ten micros are not one mini — and knowing where that stops being true is worth real money.
Mak · 3 min read · Stage 1, article 4 of 13
The names are historical. The original index contracts were far too large for anybody without an institution behind them, so the exchange published a smaller version and called it the E-mini. Two decades later it did the same thing again, at one tenth of that, and called it the Micro E-mini. The «E» meant electronic, back when that needed saying.
The same market, at two sizes
| NQ — the mini | MNQ — the micro | |
|---|---|---|
| Underlying | Nasdaq-100 | Nasdaq-100 — identical |
| One index point | $20 | $2 |
| Smallest move — 0.25 points | $5.00 | $0.50 |
| Position size steps | 1, 2, 3 contracts… | 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 of a mini… |
| Order book | Its own | Its own, and thinner |
Everything about how you read the market is unchanged between them. The chart is the same chart. What changes is the size of your mistakes, and the resolution at which you can choose that size.
Granularity is the real feature
With minis, your smallest possible position is one contract. If one contract is too much risk for the trade in front of you, your options are «too big» or «nothing». That is a genuinely bad menu, and it pushes people into taking trades at a size they did not choose.
Micros turn that single step into ten. You can take a third of your normal size because the situation is less clear, or add a quarter rather than doubling. Position sizing stops being a yes-or-no question and becomes a dial.
Where ten micros stop being one mini
Two places, and both cost money.
- Commission is per contract
- Ten micros mean ten commissions. Somewhere between about five and ten micros, one mini becomes cheaper for the same exposure — the exact point depends on the rates you pay, so work it out with your own schedule rather than a rule of thumb.
- They are separate books
- The micro has its own buyers and sellers, and there are fewer of them. The two prices stay close because people trade the difference for a living, but the micro book is thinner — which shows at the moments when depth matters most.
The practical version: micros for learning and for fine sizing, minis when the size you want is genuinely a whole mini. Crossing over is an arithmetic decision, not a graduation.
The trap on the other side
Small does not mean safe, and this is where the micro quietly hurts people.
At fifty cents a tick, a bad trade barely registers, so the discipline that would have stopped it never gets built. Then the size goes up — because the account grew, or because the small numbers felt like they were not worth the effort — and the habits that were formed while nothing was at stake arrive at a size where everything is.
The point of trading small is not to lose less. It is to practise exactly what you will do later, including the parts that are inconvenient. If you would not take the trade with ten micros on, do not take it with one.