The September equity index contracts expired on Friday morning, and the December contract is now the one on everyone's screen, micros and minis alike, because the two products run on exactly the same quarterly calendar. The roll itself happened the Monday before, September 14, right on CME's customary schedule. That shared calendar is a good place to start, since the most common mistake I see traders make with this question is treating micros and minis as different markets. They are not. They are the same market in two package sizes, and once you see it that way, the evaluation account question stops being about products and becomes about arithmetic.
Micro and mini futures track the same indexes, settle to the same final values, and expire on the same quarterly cycle. The difference is size: each micro is one tenth of its E-mini counterpart, so a point on the Micro E-mini S&P 500 is worth $5 against $50 for ES, and one tick is $1.25 against $12.50. In an evaluation account, that gap decides survival. A trailing drawdown is consumed in dollars, and micros let you place the stop where the chart says it belongs while risking a tenth of the money. Start every evaluation in micros, prove your process across at least twenty trades, and step up to minis only when your typical risk per trade stays below a small fixed share of the drawdown you have left. The market you are reading is identical. Only the arithmetic changes.
The specifications settle the "different markets" myth quickly. CME lists the Micro E-mini S&P 500 (MES) at $5 times the index with a minimum tick of 0.25 points, and the Micro E-mini Nasdaq-100 (MNQ) at $2 times the index, same 0.25-point tick. Their E-mini parents, ES and NQ, are exactly ten times larger, a ratio CME states plainly in its Micro E-mini FAQ: $5 versus $50 on the S&P, $2 versus $20 on the Nasdaq-100. The micros have been around since May 2019, trade the same near-23-hour session from 6:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET with the brief 4:15 to 4:30 p.m. halt, and settle to the same Special Opening Quotation as their E-mini counterparts on expiration morning. CME even allows offsetting micro and E-mini positions against each other at a 10:1 ratio through your clearing firm. Same index, same calendar, same settlement print.
| Index | Micro: multiplier / tick value | E-mini: multiplier / tick value |
|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | MES: $5 / $1.25 | ES: $50 / $12.50 |
| Nasdaq-100 | MNQ: $2 / $0.50 | NQ: $20 / $5.00 |
| Russell 2000 | M2K: $5 / $0.50 | RTY: $50 / $5.00 |
| Dow Jones | MYM: $0.50 / $0.50 | YM: $5 / $5.00 |
Multipliers per CME Group's Micro E-mini FAQ; tick values follow from each contract's minimum tick. Verified September 19, 2026.
So when a trader in an evaluation asks me whether micros "trade differently," my answer is that the chart cannot tell the difference. The bars, the volume profile shape, the levels that matter, all of it is the same auction. What differs is what each tick of that auction does to your account, and in an evaluation, your account is the whole game.
An evaluation account dies by drawdown, not by opinion. Suppose, as a working example, your firm hands you a $2,500 trailing drawdown. The rules vary by firm and change often, so pull the current numbers from the firm's own page the day you start, a habit I pushed hard in my 30-day replay plan for futures evaluations. Now place a routine stop 12 points away on the S&P contract. On one ES that stop is $600, because 12 points at $50 per point is $600, and a single ordinary loss has consumed 24 percent of everything the evaluation gives you. The identical trade on one MES risks $60, or 2.4 percent. Nothing about the trade idea changed. The entry, the stop placement, the read of the session are the same. One version of it can be wrong ten times while the other version is nearly dead after twice.
Run it from the risk side and the point sharpens. If your rule is to risk no more than five percent of remaining drawdown on any single trade, that is $125 against a fresh $2,500. On MES, $125 buys you a 25-point stop, which is room enough to put the stop behind a real structure. On ES, $125 is 2.5 points, which on most sessions is inside the noise of a single rotation. The mini does not just risk more per trade. It forces your stop to live where the market can reach it casually. That is the quiet reason so many evaluations end in the first week: the contract was sized to the trader's impatience, so the stop had to be sized to the drawdown, and the market ate it.
None of this makes the E-mini a mistake. It makes it a graduation. Profit targets are also denominated in dollars, and at ten times the point value a mini covers ground ten times faster once your process is actually positive. There is also a cost argument that cuts the other way: exchange and broker fees are assessed per contract, so ten micros normally carry more total round-trip cost than one mini for the same exposure. Check your own broker's fee schedule before assuming the micro route is free. And margin is its own subject, one I covered in my piece on E-mini margin: intraday margins are set by brokers, change with volatility, and deserve a fresh look before you size up rather than a number remembered from a calmer month.
My rule for the switch is boring on purpose. Step up from micros to minis only when three things are true at once: you have at least twenty consecutive evaluation-rules trades behind you, your typical per-trade risk in micros sits under five percent of remaining drawdown, and moving to one mini keeps that risk under roughly a quarter of the drawdown per trade with the same stop distance. If the third condition fails, you do not need a bigger contract. You need a bigger cushion, which means more green trades in micros first. Traders hate this answer in week one and thank me for it in week four.
Sizing does not have to be a fixed setting. The way I actually teach it is as a ladder tied to what the session is doing, and the Wyckoff phase read is the cleanest frame I know for that. Inside a trading range, accumulation or distribution still unresolved, I want the smallest rung on the ladder: one micro, because range trades fail often and the information they produce is worth more than the money. When the range resolves and a markup or markdown phase confirms with expanding spread and volume in the direction of the break, the ladder allows the second rung, a handful of micros. The top rung, a mini, is reserved for the cleanest condition I know: a confirmed trend phase, a pullback that holds where it should, and enough accumulated profit in the evaluation that the mini's risk still fits the five percent rule. A spring at the low of a range is a beautiful trade, but it is a phase C trade, an early one, and early trades belong in micros. The ladder means I never have to be brave. The market's own behavior promotes me.
Everything above is arithmetic you can rehearse before a dollar of evaluation fee leaves your pocket. In a trading simulator with true session replay, load a futures session, trade it exactly as your evaluation rules demand, and denominate every stop and target in micro ticks: $1.25 on the S&P contract, $0.50 on the Nasdaq. The tape you are reading is the same auction the micro tracks, so the read transfers one to one and the only thing you are training is the sizing discipline itself. Replay a session, log the per-trade risk as a percentage of a pretend drawdown, and watch how quickly the five percent rule changes which trades you bother taking. I laid out the full four-week version of this rehearsal in the 30-day plan, and the broader case for rebuilding an evaluation in a simulator before paying for one is in my prop firm prep guide. If you are still choosing the platform side, the futures simulator guide covers it, and if micros themselves are new to you, start with my beginner guide to micro futures and come back to this one when an evaluation is actually on the calendar.
For a trader's purposes, yes. The micro is one tenth the size of its E-mini counterpart and everything else is shared: the underlying index, the quarterly expiration cycle, the final settlement value, and the trading session. CME publishes one roll date table for the whole equity index family, which is why the September roll, September 14 by custom with expiration on Friday the 18th, moved micros and minis to the December contract together. Micro daily settlements are even derived from a volume-weighted average of the E-mini's closing trades, so the two cannot drift apart. Liquidity is deep in both for the timeframes an evaluation trader works. If your fill quality suddenly matters at the millisecond level, you have outgrown this article.
When the drawdown math says so, and not before. My threshold: twenty or more trades executed under full evaluation rules, per-trade risk in micros holding under five percent of remaining drawdown, and the mini version of your standard trade fitting inside roughly a quarter of remaining drawdown with an unchanged stop distance. Hitting a profit milestone is not a reason. Impatience with $1.25 ticks is definitely not a reason. The evaluation does not award style points for contract size, and a passed evaluation trading micros pays exactly as well as a passed evaluation trading minis, with far fewer ways to die on the way there.
Trade the micro until the arithmetic promotes you. The mini is the same market with the volume turned up, and evaluations are lost to volume, not to song choice. Rehearse the sizing ladder in replay this week, with the roll just behind us and the December contract settling in as the front month, while the tape still has a story worth practicing on. Write your firm's numbers on a card, risk five percent of what remains, and let the phase of the session, not your mood, decide which rung of the ladder you stand on.