A five thousand dollar account can hold regulated positions in the S&P, gold, and bitcoin at the same time, sized sensibly, for a few dollars of round-trip cost. I keep having to convince people this is true, because almost everything marketed at small traders points them somewhere more expensive. The route is CME micro futures, four contracts: MES for the S&P 500, MNQ for the Nasdaq 100, MGC for gold, and MBT for bitcoin.
The micros exist because the standard contracts are too big for most humans. A full E-mini S&P contract pays fifty dollars per index point, which puts the notional well into six figures at almost any plausible index level. The micro is one tenth of that, small enough that a ten thousand dollar account can size a position properly.
The contract math you actually need
Each contract comes down to four numbers, the multiplier, the tick size, the dollar value of a tick, and the margin. Everything else follows from those.
- MES, Micro E-mini S&P 500: five dollars per index point, minimum tick of 0.25 points, so $1.25 per tick.
- MNQ, Micro E-mini Nasdaq 100: two dollars per index point, tick of 0.25 points, $0.50 per tick. The smaller tick value fools people. The Nasdaq travels far more points in a session, so MNQ usually swings harder in dollar terms than MES.
- MGC, Micro Gold: ten troy ounces, tick of ten cents per ounce, $1.00 per tick.
- MBT, Micro Bitcoin: one tenth of a bitcoin, tick of five dollars per bitcoin, which works out to $0.50 per contract. Cash settled, so nobody has to deliver you a fraction of a coin.
Margin comes in two flavors that people mix up constantly. The exchange sets the overnight margin, which for the micros typically runs from several hundred to a couple thousand dollars per contract depending on the product and recent volatility. Your broker sets the intraday margin, and at discount futures shops that can be as low as fifty to a few hundred dollars. The intraday number is the one that hurts people, because it means a five thousand dollar account can technically hold a stack of contracts no sane sizing rule would allow. Margin is a deposit requirement, and it tells you nothing about what you should own.
What it costs, and why the percentage matters
All-in commissions on micros at discount brokers land around a dollar or so per side once you include exchange and regulatory fees, so call a round trip roughly two to three dollars. Against the notional, that is close to nothing. One MES contract controls tens of thousands of dollars of index exposure, so a full round trip costs on the order of a hundredth of a percent of notional, which is hard to beat anywhere in retail trading.
Where costs sneak back in is the spread. MES and MNQ are deep and usually one tick wide, so crossing the spread costs about as much as the commission. MGC is a little thinner. MBT is the one to watch, since its order book is noticeably thinner than the big offshore perp venues and the spread can widen to several ticks in quiet hours. Trade MBT with market orders in the middle of the night and you will quietly donate more to the spread than to your broker.
Against CFDs and perps
CFDs get pitched hard to small accounts, especially outside the US, because you can trade tiny sizes with no expiry. The costs are structured differently rather than absent. Your counterparty is the broker itself, the quoted spread typically carries a markup over the underlying, and holding overnight triggers a financing charge that usually sits a few percent above a benchmark rate, charged daily. For a day trade the difference can be modest. For a position held for weeks, the financing quietly compounds into one of the more expensive ways to own the exposure. Futures carry no financing drag, because the cost of carry is already priced into the contract, transparently and the same for everyone.
Crypto perps are a similar story in different clothes. Taker fees typically run a few hundredths of a percent per side, several times the micro equivalent as a share of notional, and funding payments pass between longs and shorts every few hours. In excited markets, funding on the long side has historically annualized into double digits. The perp venue also holds your collateral, and after the last several years of exchange failures that is a risk I no longer price at zero. MBT clears through CME and your margin sits at a regulated broker, next to your index and gold positions. US traders also get the blended 60/40 futures tax treatment, which is worth ten minutes with an accountant.
The honest trade-off is hours. Bitcoin trades continuously and CME does not. MBT pauses for about an hour each weekday afternoon and closes from late Friday afternoon until Sunday evening US time. Your stop cannot fire on Saturday because there is no market for it to fire into. If bitcoin moves hard over a weekend, and historically it has, you reopen Sunday evening wherever the market decides. Perps do not have that problem. Almost everything else about them is worse for a small account, but that one thing is genuinely better.
Sizing, with actual numbers
Here is the workflow I would hand a friend with a five thousand dollar account. Risk one percent per trade, fifty dollars. Before entering, decide where the trade is wrong and measure that distance in ticks. Multiply ticks by tick value to get risk per contract. If that number is over your budget for a single contract, skip the trade instead of shrinking the stop to fit.
- MES with a ten point stop: forty ticks at $1.25 is exactly fifty dollars. One contract, and that is the entire risk budget.
- MGC with a five dollar per ounce stop: fifty ticks at $1.00, also fifty dollars. One contract.
- MNQ with a realistic forty point stop: one hundred sixty ticks at $0.50 is eighty dollars. Over budget on a single contract, so no trade at this account size.
- MBT with a six hundred dollar stop distance: you hold a tenth of a coin, so that risks about sixty dollars, which is already over. Wait for setups where the stop sits closer.
Two failure modes account for most of the blowups I hear about. The first is sizing off intraday margin, holding four MES because the broker only asks a couple hundred dollars each, then discovering that four contracts lose twenty dollars for every point the index moves against you. The second is forgetting the roll. MES, MNQ, and MBT expire quarterly, volume migrates to the next contract roughly a week before expiry, and if you are still sitting in the old one you are trading a dying market with widening spreads.
If you want to pressure test a sizing rule before risking money, run it against history first. I use Blockcircle's backtester for that because it covers indexes and crypto in one place, though a spreadsheet and a year of daily data will get you most of the answer. Then trade one contract of one product for twenty or thirty trades and audit what commissions, spread, and your own exits actually did to the results. The micros are cheap enough that the tuition for that lesson is about as low as regulated markets get.