A point is
not a dollar.
ES, NQ and both micros, replayed off the exchange’s own tick tape. Money is counted the way the clearing house counts it — ticks, times tick value, times contracts — so one ES point is fifty dollars on every surface of the desk, and never a price distance with a $ in front of it.
Live on the desk today, on the same account as the equities and forex sections. The orderflow surface is the one part still in development.
- Worst fill
- 6,003.00
- Cost at the bound
- $450.00
- Day margin
- $1,500
- Round turn
- $12.00
Widen the protection and the wall walks away from you — that distance, priced at $12.50 a tick, is what a fast tape can take out of the order. Anything the wall stops does not cancel: the balance rests as a limit at 6,003.00 and waits, which is exactly what Globex does with it.
A futures desk that multiplies a price difference by a size is wrong by a factor of fifty before it draws anything.
So there is exactly one expression for it here — ticks × tick value × contracts, rounded to the tick before it is money. The blotter, the account, the chart pill and the projections on a bracket all read it from the same place.
Four contracts. Two tapes.
The micros are a sizing choice, not a second market: MES marks against the ES print and pays MES economics. Front month is resolved for the date you pick, and a roll week gets the contract that was actually trading that day.
| Contract | Tape | Tick | Per tick | Per point | Day margin | Round turn |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES E-mini S&P 500 | ES | 0.25 | $12.50 | $50 | $500 | $4.00 |
| NQ E-mini Nasdaq-100 | NQ | 0.25 | $5.00 | $20 | $1,000 | $4.00 |
| MES Micro E-mini S&P 500 | ES | 0.25 | $1.25 | $5 | $50 | $1.00 |
| MNQ Micro E-mini Nasdaq-100 | NQ | 0.25 | $0.50 | $2 | $100 | $1.00 |
Tick size and tick value are the contract spec. Day margin and commission are the desk’s defaults and yours to change — margin is reserved per contract, checked before the order is sent, and an order that would exceed free margin is refused rather than filled and reconciled afterwards.
A day that opens at 18:00 and shuts twice.
The trading day opens at 18:00 the evening before the date on its label and runs to 17:00 the next afternoon. Start the clock anywhere inside it — the overnight, the London handover, the 08:00 approach, the cash open.
Two windows are shut: the fifteen-minute equity-index halt at the cash close, and the maintenance hour that ends the day. The desk renders those as closed — a visible, stopped market — rather than skipping the clock past them and pretending you blinked.
Hour, Eastern
- Closed — halt 16:15, maintenance 17:00
- Cash hours, 09:30 to 16:00
- Where a session starts unless you move it — 08:00
- Orders are refused, not queued
- Submit into a closed window and the ticket rejects it, the way the exchange would. Nothing is held back and released at the reopen on your behalf.
- Resting orders survive the break
- Working limits and stops persist across the closure. They do not evaluate while the market is shut, because there are no prints to evaluate against.
- A stop crossed by a closure fills at the reopen
- It never fills at its own price. The first print after the market comes back is the fill, whatever that print costs — the whole gap, against you.
Holidays and early closes come from the exchange’s own calendar, as data. A day that was shortened replays short; a day the market never opened is not offered.
Five years of sessions, none of them prepared in advance.
Pick any Globex day inside the last five years. If nobody has replayed it yet, the tape is pulled and packed while you trade it — the chart starts within a second or two and builds forward ahead of the playhead, the way the equities desk loads a cold ticker.
The session form says so before you start rather than springing it on you, and it never offers a day the start path would refuse. Whoever plays that date next gets it instantly.
A limit fills when the tape proves it, not when the price is touched.
There is no depth feed, so queue position is genuinely unknowable. The desk resolves that against you: your resting order fills when the market trades through the level, or when more contracts print at it than were standing in front of you when you joined. Nothing else counts.
Market and stop orders carry a protection bound, because CME has no unbounded market order. Whatever the bound stops does not chase and does not cancel — it rests there as a limit, which is what Globex does with it.
The track is the line at your price, front to back. Your order is the green edge at the end of it.
No fill
The tape has not proven your turn came. Size you joined behind is still standing — and working off exactly that size makes you next in line, not filled — so the order rests.
Trade it from the chart.
Arm a price on the chart and the order is a line you can drag. Attach a take-profit and a stop and they draw as their own lines, shaded back to your entry, each carrying what it is worth if it fills — priced in ticks, on the same cent the fill engine will settle at.
Dragging a working order is a real cancel and replace, so it goes to the back of the queue — exactly what repricing costs on a real book. Nothing on the chart is ever drawn as done before the engine says it is.
The orderflow surface is written, and it is not on your desk yet.
Six layers, every one of them a quantity the exchange actually published — the heat is volume that transacted, not size somebody showed and never had to honour. They run today against a live session; the renderer is not yet where it needs to be, so the desk you get is the chart, the tape and the trading panels.
When it lands it will be on the account you already have. What a depth feed would have given us is named on this page rather than invented for it.
The heat ramp — contracts transacted at a price over a trailing window, dark to bright.
Prints, sizes, closures.
Nothing invented in between.
Live Live today. Futures share the account, the journal and the career ledger with every other section of the desk — no second signup.