Your paper account can practice stock index futures as well as options. Instead of buying a call or a put, a futures strategy goes long the index (betting it goes up) or short it (betting it goes down) — and unlike options, going short is a normal, everyday thing to do.

Everything else works the way you're already used to. The bot listens for alerts, opens the position, manages the exit, and fills in your Dashboard, History, and Calendar. It's all simulated money, exactly like the rest of Paper Trading.

Turning it on

Open the Strategies page while your broker is set to Paper, then create a strategy. At the very top of the Identity tab you'll see an Instrument picker:

• Options — the strategy you're used to. Buys calls and puts.
• Futures — trades the index contract itself, long or short.

Pick Futures and the rest of the form changes to match: a Futures group appears in the Signal Source dropdown, and the Risk & Orders tab swaps its percentage settings for the futures ones described below. A futures strategy carries an amber FUT tag on its card so you can tell the two apart at a glance.

You can also change an existing strategy's instrument from the same picker on its Identity tab — but only while the strategy is switched off and not holding a position. If either isn't true, the picker is greyed out and tells you which one is blocking you. That's deliberate: the two kinds read the same numbers completely differently, so flipping one mid-trade would re-interpret your exits underneath a live position.

Warning

Switching an options strategy to Futures does not convert its settings. A 1.05 take-profit meant "+5%" as an option; as a futures distance it means "1.05 points," which is roughly a tick away from your fill. Re-enter every exit number after you flip. If both your take-profit and your stop end up under 2, the save is rejected with a message saying so — that check exists purely to catch this mistake.

Both kinds run side by side

On paper you don't have to choose. Options strategies and futures strategies appear together in your list and can be enabled at the same time.

The limit is 5 enabled strategies in total, counted across both — 3 options plus 2 futures reaches it. That cap is about how much the simulator can carry, not about your subscription, so it doesn't change with your plan.

How an alert becomes a futures trade

A call alert becomes a long. A put alert becomes a short. The option's price is ignored completely — you're buying or selling the futures contract at the market.

The alert is on…	You trade (Micro)	You trade (Mini)
SPY or SPX	MES	ES
QQQ or NDX	MNQ	NQ
IWM or RUT	M2K	RTY

Multi-leg spread alerts can't be expressed as a futures position, so a futures strategy simply skips them.

Reversal Policy decides what an opposite-direction signal does to a position you're already holding:

• Close Only — flatten and stay flat.
• Close & Reverse — flatten, then enter the new side.
• Ignore — keep what you have and drop the signal.

Size: micro vs mini

Futures don't cost premium, so there's no capital-based sizing. You set Contracts Per Trade (1–10) and that's what every entry gets.

Contract Scale decides how big each of those contracts is:

Contract	One point is worth
MES (Micro S&P)	$5
ES (E-mini S&P)	$50
MNQ (Micro Nasdaq)	$2
NQ (E-mini Nasdaq)	$20
M2K (Micro Russell)	$5
RTY (E-mini Russell)	$50

Warning

A mini is ten times the size of its micro. The same 6-point stop that risks $30 on MES risks $300 on ES. Start on Micro, even on paper — practising at a size you'd never really trade teaches you the wrong lesson.

Exits are distances, not percentages

This is the one thing to internalize. An options exit is a multiplier of what you paid. A futures exit is a distance from where you filled.

Set Exit Unit to whichever unit you actually think in, and every distance field on the strategy follows it:

Unit	40 means	Best when
Points (the default)	40 index points	You think in index levels
Ticks	40 ticks — 10 points on MES, where a tick is 0.25	You think in the contract's smallest increment
Dollars	$40 per contract — 8 points on MES at $5 a point	You want the same risk across different contracts

Dollars is the one that behaves differently from contract to contract, and that's the point of it: $500 is 100 points on MES but only 10 points on RTY — the same money at risk either way.

Note

Changing the unit does not rewrite the numbers you already typed. Enter 40 in points, switch to ticks, and you now have 40 ticks — a quarter of the distance you meant. The form warns you when you switch; re-enter the values.

Then set:

• Take Profit and Stop Loss — the distance from your fill to each. Set either to 0 to turn that side off (turning the stop off is not recommended).
• Trail Trigger — how far in your favour price has to move before a Trailing Stop arms. 0 means no trailing.
• Trail Offset — how far behind the best price the stop then follows.
• Break-Even Trigger — optional. Pulls the stop up to your entry once you're this far ahead. Leave it empty to skip it.
• Multi-Tier Trailing — optional. Tightens the offset as profit grows, up to 5 tiers.

For a short, all of this is simply mirrored: your target sits below your fill, your stop above it, and "in your favour" means down. You don't enter anything differently — the direction is applied for you.

Scaling out with exit legs

Paper is the one place futures can get out in stages. In the Exit Legs box you can split a position into as many as four brackets, each with its own target, stop and share of the contracts — the same feature options strategies use. See Multi-Leg Exits for the full picture.

Two things specific to futures:

• The leg numbers are distances too, in whatever unit you picked above — 40 means 40 points, not 40%.
• The Take Profit and Stop Loss boxes disappear once you have legs, because the strategy's bracket is then taken from them: the nearest target and the tightest stop. The bottom of the Exit Legs box shows you the pair.

Example

3 contracts, three legs at 8 / 16 / 30 points with a 6 point stop each. The first contract comes off at +8, the second at +16, and the last runs for +30 — and the bracket the strategy stores reads 8 pt / 6 pt.

Note

You need at least as many contracts as legs. With 1 contract and 3 legs the bot arms the first leg only, then puts the others back if you scale in later.

Warning

On Tradovate this doesn't work — the broker only tracks one bracket per position, so the strategy falls back to that single derived pair and your legs go unused. The box tells you so in orange when you're on a Tradovate account. Plus500 runs your legs the same way paper does.

Locking in profit as legs fill

Once a strategy has two or more exit legs, you can turn on Profit Lock in the box right below them. Each time a leg hits its target, the stops on the legs that are still open get tightened, so the trade can't turn into a loss.

On futures it works in the contract's own prices, in both directions: a long's stops move up, and a short's stops move down. A tightened stop never crosses your entry into losing territory, and it is never loosened.

Futures use the Half Delta style only. The new stop lands part of the way from the previous level (your entry, then the last target that filled) to the target that just filled. At 50%, that's the midpoint.

Example

You're long 3 MES at 6,300. Your legs have targets at +10 / +20 / +30 points and a 10 point stop each (6,290), and Profit Lock is on at 50%. The first leg fills at 6,310, so the other two stops move up to 6,305. The second leg fills at 6,320, so the last stop moves up to 6,315. If price then drops back, that last contract still closes 15 points ahead.

Example

Here's the same setup as a short at 6,300: targets at 6,290 / 6,280 / 6,270, stops at 6,310. After the first fill, the other stops come down to 6,295. After the second fill, the last stop comes down to 6,285.

Note

Sometimes price has already pulled back past the new stop by the time the bot places it. Placing it then would close the leg on the spot, so the bot keeps the old stop and places the new one as soon as price is back on the right side of it.

Warning

Like exit legs, Profit Lock doesn't work on Tradovate today. Tradovate holds one bracket for the whole position, so there are no separate legs for it to adjust. It works on paper and on Plus500.

A worked example

You create a paper strategy, pick Futures, and set:

• Contracts Per Trade: 1, Contract Scale: Micro
• Exit Unit: Points
• Take Profit: 10 pts, Stop Loss: 6 pts
• Trail Trigger: 5 pts, Trail Offset: 3 pts

A call alert on SPY arrives and fills you long 1 MES at 5,900. Your target goes to 5,910 and your stop to 5,894 — a $50 win or a $30 loss at $5 a point. Price runs to 5,905, which is 5 points of profit, so the trail arms and starts following 3 points behind the high. A push to 5,908 drags the stop up to 5,905, and from that moment the trade can't finish red no matter what happens next.

Had the alert been a put, everything would be the same upside down: short at 5,900, target 5,890, stop 5,906.

Margin, and what happens at 4:00 PM ET

Futures don't cost you premium — they set money aside as margin. Opening a position moves no cash at all; cash moves when it closes, by whatever you made or lost.

Two different margin rates apply, and the simulator models both:

• Day margin — the intraday rate, roughly $50 for one MES. It applies from the 6:00 PM ET Sunday–Thursday session open through 4:00 PM ET the next weekday.
• Overnight margin — the exchange's rate, roughly $2,509 for one MES. It applies from 4:00 PM ET, through the 4:00–6:00 PM settlement gap, and all weekend from Friday afternoon.

At 4:00 PM ET every open futures position is re-reserved at the overnight rate. If your account can't cover the new total, positions are closed automatically — biggest requirement first — until it can, and you get an alert for each one. What counts as "cover" is your cash plus the profit or loss riding on your open positions, so a winning position helps pay for itself.

Two things worth planning around:

1. Holding overnight needs roughly 50× the margin of a day trade. A balance that comfortably day-trades five MES may not be able to hold a single one overnight.
2. Between 4:00 and 6:00 PM ET, new entries are quoted at the overnight rate too. A small account can be refused an entry in that window that it would have been given at 10:00 AM.

At the 6:00 PM ET reopen everything goes back to the day rate on its own.

Tip

Index futures trade nearly around the clock on weeknights, so a futures strategy can take signals long after the stock market has closed. On a futures strategy the Trading Hours panel offers an Always On (24/7) switch — leave it on to accept signals at any hour, or switch it off to build your own window from the seven-day grid (shown in US Eastern).

What futures strategies don't do yet

Some options features simply don't have a futures equivalent, and their settings are hidden rather than shown-and-ignored:

• No averaging or scaling in. A repeat signal in the same direction on a contract you already hold is dropped. One position per contract.
• No Side Swapping and no Reverse — both are built around option premium.
• Not covered by the backtester, which replays option prices. Practising on paper is the rehearsal for futures.

Entering one by hand

You don't have to wait for a signal. Turn on Allow Manual Entry on the strategy and you can open a futures position yourself from Hybrid Trade — press GO LONG or GO SHORT to get in at the market, or rest a limit order at a price you choose. The strategy still manages the exit exactly as it would on a signal, so it's a good way to try your target and stop settings on a real (paper) position.

Your Killswitch, Trade Limits, Skip Days, and Trading Hours all work on a futures strategy exactly as they do on an options one.

Reading a futures trade card

A futures card looks a little different from an options one, because the numbers a futures trader cares about are different.

• The ticker carries a slash. Futures show as /NQ, /MES, /MNQ — the way they're written everywhere else in the trading world. That slash is how you tell an index future from a stock with a similar name at a glance.
• The first badge says LONG or SHORT instead of CALL or PUT. Blue for long, red for short. An options card still says CALL or PUT.
• Movement is shown in ticks, not percent. A percentage is useless on a futures contract: a trade that made $605 on one NQ contract only moved the index 0.1%. The same move is 121 ticks, and that's what the History page's movement column, the trade card's bar, and the trailing-stop card's Phase 1 / Phase 2 / Peak / Stop boxes all show. Money and movement are answered separately on purpose — the Gross/Fees/Net row already tells you the dollars, so the bar tells you the distance. If you'd rather see the bar in index points, set Futures P&L Unit to Points in Dashboard Settings and the bar follows it.
• The progress bar is scaled to your bracket. Your entry, stop, and target spread across the whole bar instead of bunching up in one corner, so you can actually see where price is between them.
• Your move sits under the current price. A green +69.5t under Current means price is 69.5 ticks past your entry in your favor. Red means it has moved against you.
• Exit-leg bars count ticks. On a trade split into exit legs, each open leg has a stop bar and a target bar, and each one shows how many ticks price has covered out of that leg's total. 69.5 / 100t on a target bar means price has covered 69.5 of the 100 ticks to that leg's target. If you've moved a leg's stop to break-even or into profit (with Dynamic Stops, say), there's no loss room left to count, so its stop bar shows how far price can pull back before that stop fills instead. For example, 41.5t away.

Tip

If the bar and labels feel abstract in dollars, switch Futures P&L Unit to Ticks. A stop "30 ticks away" is easier to judge at speed than "$150 away," and everything on the card — including the Dynamic Stops buttons — switches with it.

Fees on futures

Futures fees work nothing like options fees, and the portal now prices them properly. There is no percentage-of-value component at all — you pay a flat amount per contract, each way:

• what your broker keeps (the commission),
• what the exchange charges,
• a small regulatory fee.

Only the commission changes with your Tradovate plan, so that's the one thing the portal asks you for. Open Dashboard Settings → Display and set Futures Commission Plan to Free, Monthly, or Lifetime. It defaults to Free, which is both the most common plan and the most expensive per contract — so if you never touch it, your fees are slightly overstated rather than understated.

This estimate uses Tradovate's published pricing, whichever live futures broker you plan to use. The portal doesn't have Plus500's commission schedule yet, so once you switch to Plus500, its trades show $0 in fees rather than a guessed number. That $0 means the fees aren't set up yet, not that Plus500 is free to trade.

Worked example, one /NQ contract opened and closed on the Free plan:

	Per side	Round turn
Commission	$1.29	$2.58
Exchange	$1.33	$2.66
Regulatory	$0.02	$0.04
Total	$2.64	$5.28

A micro contract like /MNQ is far cheaper — $1.56 for the same round turn. Switching to the Monthly plan takes /NQ down to $4.68 and /MNQ to $1.36.

Note

These are estimates the portal calculates for display, not numbers pulled from your broker statement. They only appear when Include Broker Fees is switched on in Dashboard Settings. Check one closed trade against your Tradovate statement before you lean on them.

Adjusting a live futures trade

You can now move the stop and the target on an open futures position from the trade card, the same way you can on options.

Typing a price. Click the Stop or Target price on an active card and it becomes an input. Type a new price and press the ✓ (or Enter). Futures prices are long, so the box is wider on a futures card than an options one — the whole 24012.25 fits.

Tapping it up and down. Next to each input is a ▲/▼ pair that nudges the price by exactly one tick — 0.25 on /ES and /NQ, 0.1 on /RTY. It's much easier than typing on a phone. Tap as fast as you like: the number moves with every tap, but the change is only sent to your broker about half a second after you stop tapping, so a run of taps becomes one order change instead of ten.

Dynamic Stops. The BE button and the profit-lock buttons beside it now work on futures. They used to sit permanently greyed out, because they measured your progress as a percentage — and a futures trade that's several hundred dollars up has often moved the index less than half a percent, which never cleared the threshold. They're measured in your chosen unit now, so they light up when you're genuinely in profit:

• BE moves your stop one tick past your entry, so the worst the trade can do is scratch.
• The buttons after it divide the room between where your stop already is and where price is now, into quarters. Click one and the row re-divides what's left, so you can keep ratcheting as the trade runs.

Prices always land on the contract's own tick grid, and a level too close to the current price to place safely stays greyed out rather than being rejected by your broker.

Warning

A stop can only be placed where it wouldn't trigger the instant it arrives. If you try to set one at or through the current price, the change is refused and your existing stop is left exactly where it was — nothing is ever cancelled first, so your position is never briefly unprotected.