If you have come to futures from CFD evaluations, the thing to unlearn first is leverage. A futures firm does not give you a leverage ratio and let you size into it. It caps the number of contracts you may hold, and it changes that cap as your account develops.
The cap, and how it moves
During the evaluation you are given a fixed maximum — typically something like 5 contracts on a $50,000 account, 10 on $100,000, 15 on $150,000. Once funded, most firms start you lower than the evaluation cap and scale it up in steps as end-of-day profit accumulates above your starting capital.
That has a consequence worth planning around: your tightest sizing constraint is at the moment you are least established, and it loosens exactly as your buffer grows. It is a sensible design, and it means a strategy that only works at full size is a strategy you cannot trade here for the first few weeks.
Micros are not a beginner's product
Most firms count ten micro contracts as one standard against your limit. A 5-contract cap is therefore 50 micros, and micros let you size in tenths.
Traders skip micros because they feel like a smaller ambition. They are the opposite: they are the only way to express a position between "one contract" and "two contracts", which on a dollar drawdown is frequently exactly where the correct size sits. If your arithmetic says 1.4 contracts, the answer is 14 micros, not 2.
Sizing against a dollar, not a percentage
A percentage drawdown scales with your account and forces you to think in ratios. A dollar drawdown does not, which makes the sum simpler and considerably less forgiving. Work it in this order:
- Take your daily allowance. Say $1,000.
- Decide what fraction of it one trade may cost. A fifth is defensible. That is $200.
- Take your real stop distance — the one your strategy actually uses, in ticks.
- Divide. $200 ÷ (stop in ticks × tick value) = your position size. Round down.
On an instrument with a $12.50 tick value and a 12-tick stop, one contract risks $150. Your $200 budget buys one contract, not two. Take the micro route and it buys thirteen micros. That is the whole method, and the discipline is in rounding down rather than in the arithmetic.
The same logic in percentage terms is covered in position sizing against a drawdown, which is worth reading alongside this.
Why the maximum is a trap
The permitted cap reflects the firm's tolerance, not yours. Size at the cap on a $2,000 total drawdown and two ordinary losing sessions can end the account before you have traded a full week.
Worse, a dollar drawdown does not replenish the way a percentage one recalculates. It is a fixed amount of room, it is smaller than the percentage figure you are used to, and the firms that trail it upward only stop trailing once you have made real progress. Early size is the decision that determines whether you ever get there.
Before you subscribe
Three questions, in writing:
- What is my contract limit in the evaluation, and what is it on day one of the funded account?
- How do micros count against it?
- What triggers each scaling step — end-of-day profit, closed profit, or something else?
The third one matters more than it sounds. A cap that scales on end-of-day balance behaves very differently from one that scales on realised profit, and the firms do not all do it the same way.
Contract limits and scaling steps are documented per plan on every futures profile we list. Compare the futures firms.