Profit, loss and risk for Micro E-mini S&P 500 futures: MES specs pre-loaded. Change the contract if you need another.
The Micro E-mini S&P 500 (MES) is one-tenth of the full ES contract. Each point is worth $5, the minimum tick is 0.25, and one tick is $1.25. A 10-point MES move is $50 per contract.
For comparison, that same 10-point move on full-size ES is $500. The micro is what makes the S&P tradeable for accounts that would otherwise be forced into a size where one bad session does structural damage.
MES is arguably the best learning instrument in futures. The S&P is the deepest, most heavily arbitraged index contract in the world, which makes its behavior comparatively orderly: moves are contested, reversals are negotiated rather than violent. Learning to read structure on a market that behaves is worth more than learning it on one that doesn't.
At $5 a point, a disciplined 8-point stop risks $40. That's a number you can take twenty times while learning without the losses themselves becoming the lesson.
The wrong trigger is confidence. The right one is arithmetic: when your position sizing on MES rounds to ten or more contracts, the micro has stopped serving you and you're paying more in commission than the granularity is worth. Until then, contract count is a feature: it lets you scale out in pieces that full-size ES simply can't express.
If you're scaling out at multiple targets, the multiple-exit calculator handles the blended math.