The NQ Futures Contract, Translated Into Dollars and Risk

By Marcel Hambálek · Senior Trader, For Traders

The NQ futures contract is the CME Group E-mini Nasdaq-100 future: $20 per index point, a 0.25-point minimum tick worth $5, and roughly $460,000 notional with the Nasdaq-100 near 23,000. It trades on CME Globex nearly 24/5, quarterly in March, June, September and December, and settles for cash against the Special Opening Quotation.

Key takeaways

• One NQ point equals $20 and one 0.25 tick equals $5, so 10 points = 40 ticks = $200 and 30 points = $600 per contract.
• Notional value (~$460,000 at 23,000) is not what you pay — intraday day-trading margin at a Rithmic, Tradovate or NinjaTrader-connected broker is typically a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per contract.
• Ten MNQ contracts equal one NQ: the Micro E-mini runs $2 per point, $0.50 per tick and roughly $46,000 notional.
• NQ's daily range routinely runs 250–400 points, which makes a sub-25-point stop a slippage lottery around FOMC and NFP.
• NQ rolls quarterly on the H, M, U, Z cycle, with volume migrating to the next month around the second Thursday before expiry.
• In an evaluation, your daily loss limit and trailing drawdown — not the chart — decide whether you're allowed to trade NQ or should still be on MNQ.

Watch: related video

What is NQ in trading?

NQ is the ticker for the CME Group E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures contract — an exchange-traded, centrally cleared derivative on the Nasdaq-100 Index (NDX), carrying a fixed $20 multiplier per index point. That's the whole answer in one line: one NQ contract is a standardized promise, cleared through CME, worth $20 times wherever the Nasdaq-100 happens to be trading. No broker sets that number. No dealing desk adjusts it. It's published spec, same for every trader on the planet.

NQ vs the US100 / NSDQ CFD you already trade

If you've been trading US100 or NSDQ as a CFD, you already know the index — you just don't know the contract. Your CFD is a broker-quoted derivative: your broker sets the lot size, the spread, sometimes the overnight financing, and you're trading against their internal book (or a liquidity provider one layer removed). NQ strips that out. Every NQ order — yours, a hedge fund's, a market maker's — goes into one order book on CME Globex, visible depth, transparent volume, published open interest. Same index exposure, completely different plumbing. You're not trading a broker's mirror of the Nasdaq-100 anymore; you're trading the actual futures market that CFD providers reference to build their own quotes.

Cash settlement and the Special Opening Quotation

NQ is a cash settled index future — nobody's taking delivery of 100 Nasdaq stocks at expiry. On the third Friday of the contract month (March, June, September, December), the contract settles against the Special Opening Quotation (SOQ), a value calculated from the opening prices of the index's component stocks that morning. Your account gets debited or credited the dollar difference, position closed, done. In practice, almost nobody holds NQ into settlement — traders roll to the next quarterly contract days ahead of expiry to dodge the liquidity thinning near the SOQ print. But knowing the mechanism matters: it's why NQ can trade at a slight premium or discount to the cash index (contango/backwardation dynamics) heading into rollover week.

Pips vs ticks: translating forex habits into futures

Forget pips. NQ moves in ticks, and the smallest tick is 0.25 index points — not 0.1, not 1 pip of anything. That quarter-point tick is worth a fixed $5 ($20 multiplier × 0.25), every single time, regardless of your broker, your account size, or what pair you used to trade. A 10-point move in the Nasdaq-100 is 40 ticks, or $200 per contract. That fixed-dollar tick value is the single biggest mental shift coming from forex or CFDs — there's no variable pip value to calculate based on lot size and account currency. One contract, one tick size, one dollar value. It's simpler once it clicks, but it trips up nearly every trader in their first week on NQ.

NQ contract specifications and notional value

One NQ contract controls the Nasdaq-100 Index × $20 — with the index sitting near 23,000, that's roughly $460,000 of notional exposure riding on a single contract. That number moves every tick, so the formula matters more than any snapshot figure.

The full contract spec sheet

Every detail below comes from CME Group's own contract specifications for the E-mini Nasdaq-100 future. Bookmark this table — you'll reference it more than you think, especially the tick value when you're sizing a stop.

What 1 NQ contract is worth at today's index level

The nq notional value formula is simple and it never changes, only the inputs do: index level × $20 = notional value. That's the whole calculation — no lot-size table, no leverage tiers to memorize.

• Nasdaq-100 at 21,000 → 1 NQ contract value = $420,000 notional
• Nasdaq-100 at 23,000 → 1 NQ contract value = $460,000 notional
• Nasdaq-100 at 25,000 → 1 NQ contract value = $500,000 notional

Whatever the index prints when you're reading this, run it through that same math. This is also why nq contract specifications matter more to your risk sizing than your entry signal — the same 1% stop is a very different dollar figure at 21,000 versus 25,000.

Trading hours and the daily maintenance break

NQ trading hours run Sunday 6:00pm ET through Friday 5:00pm ET on CME Globex — close to a 24-hour, 5-day-a-week session, broken only by a short daily maintenance window (typically 5:00pm–6:00pm ET). That near-continuous clock is the whole point of trading futures over a cash-market CFD: the Nasdaq-100 doesn't stop reacting to news just because New York went home.

An earnings miss out of Tokyo, a weak German PMI print, or a surprise central bank comment during the European morning all move NQ hours before the US cash open. If you're only watching price from 9:30am ET, you're seeing the aftermath, not the move. The overnight session is thinner and gaps more, but it's where the first reaction to global risk actually happens on this contract.

NQ price per point and per tick: the dollar ladder

NQ price per point is $20, and the minimum tick is 0.25 points worth $5. That's the whole engine — every dollar figure you'll ever calculate on this contract comes from multiplying points by 20 or ticks by 5. Get this ladder memorized cold, because sizing a trade under pressure is the wrong time to be doing long division.

How many ticks is 10 points on NQ?

10 points is 40 ticks. NQ moves in 0.25-point increments, so one full point equals 4 ticks — multiply any point figure by 4 to get ticks, or by 20 to get dollars. 10 points × 4 = 40 ticks, and 10 points × $20 = $200 per contract. Same math, two different lenses on the same move.

How much is 30, 50, 75 and 100 points on NQ?

Here's the full conversion table — save it, screenshot it, whatever keeps you from fat-fingering a position size at 9:29am ET.

Turning ATR into a realistic stop distance

A 10-point stop on NQ isn't tight risk management — it's noise. NQ's daily ATR (average true range) commonly runs 250–400 points right now with the Nasdaq-100 near 23,000, which means 10 points is roughly 3% of an average day's range. Price chops through that before your coffee's cold. For a discretionary intraday stop, 25–30 points ($500–$600 per contract) is the realistic floor, and plenty of setups on a trending day warrant 50+ points of room just to avoid getting shaken out on a normal pullback.

The caveat most breakdowns skip: slippage isn't hypothetical on this contract. Around FOMC decisions and NFP releases, liquidity can thin out for a few seconds right as the number hits, and a 5–15 point gap on a market stop is a normal outcome, not a broken platform. That's $100–$300 per contract of extra risk baked into the release itself — before your actual stop even triggers. Size for the stop distance you planned, then pad your worst-case mentally for the slippage on top of it. If you're building this into a challenge account with a daily loss limit, that gap can matter a lot more than the headline stop size suggests.

What does one NQ contract actually cost to buy?

You don't pay the notional value of an NQ contract — you post margin. With the Nasdaq-100 near 23,000, one E-mini Nasdaq-100 future controls roughly $460,000 of index exposure, but the cash you actually need to hold it is a fraction of that: a few hundred dollars per contract at an intraday day-trading margin rate, or a few thousand dollars per contract if you're holding overnight at CME Group's exchange maintenance rate. Those are two different numbers answering two different questions, and most confusion about "how much is one contract of NQ" comes from mixing them.

Notional exposure vs cash required

Notional value is what you're exposed to, not what you deposit. The formula is simple and survives any price move: Notional = Index level × $20 × number of contracts. At 23,000, that's $460,000 per contract. NQ margin per contract is a separate figure set by the exchange (maintenance) and by your broker or prop firm (initial, often lower for day trading). Initial and maintenance margin move with volatility — they get wider around FOMC and NFP, not narrower — so treat any dollar figure here as a snapshot, not a constant.

Scaling table: 1, 5, 10, 50 and 210 contracts

Here's the split at an index level of 23,000, using illustrative margin rates of roughly $500/contract intraday and $2,000/contract maintenance — check your own platform's current numbers, since they change with the VIX and the calendar.

That last row is the one people search for directly: 210 NQ contracts value at 23,000 is just shy of $97 million in notional exposure — a size you'll see referenced in futures prop trading around block or multi-lot allocations, not something a retail account backs into by accident.

Why block size is a margin question, not a conviction question

A tick on NQ is worth $5 per contract. At 210 contracts, one tick is $1,050 — before the market has moved a single point in your favor or against you. A 30-point swing, which NQ can do in the time it takes NFP to print, is a $600-per-contract move, or $126,000 across 210 contracts. That's not a statement about how right you are on direction. It's a statement about margin capacity, daily loss limits, and whether the liquidity at that moment can absorb your fill without slippage eating the edge you calculated on paper. Traders who scale into size like this size the position to the account and the stop distance first, then let conviction decide entry timing — never the other way around.

NQ margin requirements: intraday vs overnight

Intraday day-trading margin on NQ is set by your futures broker, not CME — often just a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars per contract — while any position still open when the session's overnight margin window kicks in must meet CME's full initial margin, which runs into five figures per contract. Mixing the two up is how accounts get liquidated at prices nobody saw coming.

CME initial and maintenance margin

CME Group sets two numbers for every futures contract: initial margin (what you need to open an overnight position) and maintenance margin (the floor you can't drop below before a margin call fires). These are exchange-mandated minimums, recalculated by CME's SPAN methodology as volatility shifts — margin on NQ was materially higher during the 2022 drawdown than it is in a low-vol summer chop. Every broker and clearing firm must hold at least this much for an overnight NQ position. None of it is optional, and none of it is negotiable at the individual account level.

Broker intraday day-trading margin (Rithmic, Tradovate, NinjaTrader)

Intraday margin is a different animal entirely. Platforms running on Rithmic, Tradovate, and NinjaTrader offer discounted day-trading margin because the clearing firm is only exposed to that risk during liquid market hours — not overnight, not through a gap. This is a courtesy the broker extends, and it evaporates on a schedule.

The 4:59pm problem: why the step-up liquidates accounts

Here's the trap. You're holding 5 NQ on intraday margin, comfortable, well within your day-trading buffer. At 4:59pm ET the platform reverts to full CME overnight margin. Your account, sized for the discounted rate, is suddenly short tens of thousands of dollars in required margin — and the system doesn't send a polite email first. It force-flattens the position, often at the worst fill of the session, or issues a margin call you have minutes to meet. This isn't a bug; it's the mechanism working exactly as designed to protect the clearing firm from overnight gap risk.

None of this is a measure of your risk. Margin only defines whether the position is allowed to exist on the platform's books — your stop distance is what defines what you actually stand to lose. A trader who understands nq margin requirements sizes contracts to the account and the stop first, then checks the clock before deciding whether that position survives the close.

NQ vs MNQ vs ES vs MES: the micro math

Ten MNQ contracts equal one NQ. The Micro E-mini Nasdaq-100 (MNQ) is exactly one-tenth the size of the standard NQ contract in every dimension that matters — dollar-per-point, tick value, and notional exposure — which makes the conversion math trivial once you've got the base numbers memorized.

*Notional shifts daily with the underlying index — use it for scale, not for margin planning.

How many MNQ contracts equal 1 NQ?

Ten. That's the whole answer to "how many MNQ is 1 NQ" — CME Group designed the Micro E-mini Nasdaq-100 as a 1:10 replica of the full-size contract, tracking the identical Nasdaq-100 index, the same tick increment (0.25 points), and the same quarterly expiration cycle. The only variable that changes is your dollar-per-point multiplier: $20 becomes $2. If you're currently running 3 NQ contracts and want to scale down without changing your strategy's point-based stop and target logic, 30 MNQ gets you there exactly.

What 27 points on one MNQ actually pays

How much is 1 micro NQ contract worth per point? $2. So 27 points on a single MNQ contract pays $54 before commissions — the kind of small, quotable move that shows up constantly in backtests and trade journals. Scale it up: 100 points on 5 MNQ contracts is $1,000 flat, which is why a lot of traders size their first funded attempts in MNQ units rather than jumping straight to NQ. The index doesn't know or care which contract you're trading — MNQ tracks the same price action, the same gaps, the same reaction to CPI and FOMC prints, with liquidity deep enough on CME Globex that fills and slippage are rarely the deciding factor. The real cost of trading micros isn't worse execution — it's commission drag per unit of exposure, since you're paying a similar per-contract fee on a tenth of the dollar risk.

Micro ES price per point if you'd rather trade the S&P 500

If Nasdaq-100 volatility runs hotter than your account can stomach, the E-mini S&P 500 (ES) and its micro sibling, the Micro E-mini S&P 500 (MES), sit on the same 10:1 scaling. ES pays $50 per point with a $12.50 tick; MES pays $5 per point with a $1.25 tick. A 10-point ES move is $500 — the same 10-point move on MES is $50. Same index, same session structure, one-tenth the dollar swing per point. Choosing between NQ-family and ES-family contracts is a volatility decision first, size decision second.

NQ contract rollover: the 2026–2027 calendar

NQ expires quarterly on the third Friday of March, June, September and December, and the practical roll happens about eight days earlier — around the second Thursday of the expiry month — when volume and open interest flip to the next contract. Miss that window and you're trading a dying front month: thin book, wider spreads, and fills that make no sense until you check the calendar.

Expiry and roll dates for H26, M26, U26, Z26 and H27

CME futures use standardized month codes — H = March, M = June, U = September, Z = December. So NQ H26 is the March 2026 contract, NQ Z26 is December 2026, and so on. Last Trading Day is fixed by CME rule as the third Friday of the contract month; trading in the expiring contract halts at 8:30 a.m. Central Time that day. Here's the working nq contract rollover 2026 calendar through the first quarter of 2027:

The second-Thursday volume migration rule

Exchanges don't force the roll — traders do, collectively, and they do it early. Across every recent NQ cycle, the next-quarter contract overtakes the expiring one in both volume and open interest roughly one week before last trade — that's the second Thursday you see in the table above. The new front month usually trades at a small basis to the old one, reflecting interest-rate carry and expected dividend flow on the Nasdaq-100 constituents between now and the next expiry. That basis is why a raw price chart shows a gap at the roll — the contract you're now watching simply isn't priced identically to the one you were watching yesterday. If you build systems or backtest strategies, use a continuous contract series with back-adjustment, not a raw stitched chart, or your historical P&L will be wrong at every roll date.

How to avoid trading a dying front month

Every prop trader meets this symptom eventually: stops getting hit on noise, fills a few ticks worse than expected, spreads that look nothing like the tight two-tick market you're used to. Nine times out of ten it's because you're still working the expiring month after the crowd has already rolled to the next one. Fix it mechanically:

• Check open interest, not just volume — OI flips to the new contract slightly ahead of volume in most cycles.
• Roll your working positions by the second Thursday listed above, not on expiry week.
• If your charting platform defaults to the front month automatically, verify it against the calendar — some platforms lag the true liquidity shift by a day or two.

None of this changes if you're trading NQ inside a funded evaluation or a live account — the mechanics are identical, only the capital behind the fills is different.

Sizing NQ and MNQ inside a prop account

Maximum contract size in an evaluation isn't a feeling — it's whatever keeps one full stop-out under roughly 20–33% of your daily loss limit, with the trailing drawdown as the hard ceiling above that. Trade bigger than that and you're not managing risk per trade, you're gambling on the first candle going your way.

Daily loss limit and trailing drawdown set your size, not the chart

Two numbers box you in during any prop firm futures position sizing exercise: the daily loss limit (a fixed dollar figure you can't breach in a session) and the trailing drawdown (a floor that follows your peak equity upward, never down). The chart tells you where your stop goes. The account tells you how many contracts you're allowed to put behind it.

Trailing drawdown is the one traders misjudge. It doesn't reset to your starting balance each day — it climbs with every new equity high. Bank $1,200 by 10am and your drawdown floor moves up $1,200 with it. That's good news for a funded trader locking in gains, and bad news for anyone who front-loads risk expecting the old cushion to still be there at 2pm.

Worked example: a 40-point NQ stop against a $2,000 buffer

NQ moves $20 per point, so a 40-point stop costs $800 per contract before commission. Against a $2,000 daily loss limit, one NQ contract gives you exactly two losing trades before you're done for the day — no third attempt, no revenge entry. That's the whole account, mechanically, in one sentence.

Run the same 40-point stop on MNQ — one-tenth the notional, $2 per point — and it costs $80 per contract. The same $2,000 buffer now covers 20+ losing trades' worth of risk if you were reckless enough to take them, but more usefully it lets you scale in 2, 3, 5 contracts at a time and actually manage size instead of betting the account on a single fill.

Using a 20% single-trade risk cap, most evaluation account contract limits simply don't clear one NQ contract until the buffer gets into the $3,000+ range at tight stops. MNQ is where the granularity lives — it's built for sizing up gradually instead of jumping straight to full notional.

When you've earned the promotion from MNQ to NQ

Move up when your average loss and average win are stable across 40–50 trades — not when you feel confident after three green days. Confidence is a mood. A stable average is a distribution, and distributions are what your daily loss limit actually cares about. If your average loss is drifting or your R:R keeps flipping depending on the session, you're not ready to 10x your per-point risk by switching contracts.

The For Traders Futures Challenge enforces these limits for you rather than leaving sizing to willpower — the daily loss limit and trailing drawdown are hard rails, not suggestions, which is precisely why they force the discipline that graduates traders from MNQ to full NQ size. CME index futures sit as the second-biggest inst

Should you trade NQ or MNQ?

Pros

• NQ: one order handles size that would take ten MNQ fills, with lower total commission per unit of exposure
• NQ: deepest index futures liquidity after ES, so large orders fill cleanly outside news windows
• MNQ: $2 per point lets you take a proper 40-point structural stop on a small account instead of a noise stop
• MNQ: scale in and out in tenths, which makes partial profit-taking possible inside tight drawdown limits
• Both: identical index, identical session, identical roll calendar — the skill transfers directly

Cons / risks

• NQ: a single 30-point adverse move is $600, which can be a third of an evaluation's daily loss limit in one trade
• NQ: intraday margin relief disappears at the close, and holding overnight can trigger auto-liquidation
• MNQ: commission drag per point of exposure is higher than NQ once you're routinely trading ten-lots
• MNQ: the small dollar figures encourage over-trading because losses don't feel real until the daily total lands
• Both: FOMC and NFP slippage ignores your stop distance and can double the loss you modelled

Frequently Asked Questions