By Benjamin Roure L'Hermitte
A futures contract lets you control a notional value much larger than the margin deposit you actually tie up, which makes every tick of price movement disproportionately heavy in dollars compared to an unleveraged instrument. Add an expiration date that inevitably closes or rolls your position, and you get an instrument that needs a journal built for its own mechanics, not a copy-paste of what you'd do with stocks.
- Leverage is built into the contract itself, through margin, not bolted on afterward like in other markets.
- Expiration and rollover are events to track explicitly, not technical footnotes.
- The tick, not the percentage, is the unit a futures contract is quoted and counted in.
- Converting to dollars without going through tick value skews your risk calculation.
Futures have a fundamentally different mechanic from stocks or even spot forex: you never own the underlying asset, you hold a contract committing to a price for a given expiration, with leverage built into the very structure of the product through the margin system. This mechanic changes what a journal needs to capture to stay useful.
This guide details the futures trading specifics to track in your journal: leverage through margin, expiration rollover, tick value, and why the tick, rather than the percentage, is the unit that matches how a contract is quoted. For the basics common to every market, see our trading journal guide.
Leverage built into margin, not bolted on afterward
On a plain cash stock account, your exposure roughly equals your capital committed. On futures, the structure is different from the start: a contract controls a notional value far higher than the margin deposit required to open it. The CFTC Glossary, published by the US derivatives regulator, defines that margin as the money or collateral a customer deposits with their broker, and adds that it is not partial payment on a purchase. It's not a choice you toggle like a leverage slider at a forex broker, it's the very nature of the product. A modest price move on the underlying translates into a much larger result on the capital you actually committed.
This trait makes tracking the margin used relative to your available capital particularly important. The order of magnitude comes from a secondary source, the pages of a regulated US broker: according to Charles Schwab's page on Micro E-mini futures, margin could run from just 5% to 7% of the contract's notional value. A trader who only looks at total capital without tracking how much margin each position ties up can end up, without realizing it, with total exposure far higher than what they thought they'd taken, simply by stacking several contracts on different underlyings.
Expiration and rollover: an event to log
Unlike a stock you can hold indefinitely, a futures contract has an expiration date: the CFTC Glossary defines it as an agreement to purchase or sell a commodity for delivery in the future that may be satisfied by delivery or offset, and describes the roll-over as lifting a near futures position and re-establishing it in a more deferred delivery month. On the DAX, for instance, Eurex's page on DAX futures sets the last trading day on the third Friday of the maturity month. Approaching that date while still holding a position therefore forces a choice: close the position, or roll it into the next contract, an operation with its own cost in spread and in the price gap between the two expirations, a gap the same glossary calls contango when the distant month quotes above the near one, and backwardation when it quotes below.
A rigorous futures journal explicitly notes when a rollover happened and its associated cost, rather than letting that event get lost in the general P&L as if it were an ordinary market move. Without this tracking, a trader can misread the rollover cost as a classic trading loss and wrongly go looking for an execution or analysis error where there wasn't one.
The tick, the natural unit of result
Every futures contract has a minimum tick, which the CFTC Glossary defines as the smallest increment of price movement possible in trading a given contract, and a dollar or euro value tied to that tick, which varies widely from one contract to another. That value is set by the exchange listing the contract and isn't guessed, it's known per contract: Eurex's page on DAX futures gives a one-point tick worth 25 euros on the DAX contract, 5 euros on the Mini-DAX and 1 euro on the Micro-DAX. Thinking in ticks or points rather than percentage therefore matches how the contract is quoted and how the market talks about it.
| Concept | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Minimum tick | Smallest possible price move on the contract |
| Tick value | Currency amount corresponding to one tick, specific to each contract |
| Initial margin | Deposit required to open the position, far below notional value |
| Maintenance margin | Level at or below which the broker issues a margin call |
Converting a price move directly into percentage without going through tick value can skew your risk calculation, because the underlying's percentage change tells you nothing about your real result once the contract multiplier is applied. The right habit is reasoning in ticks or points for the technical read, then converting to currency through tick value for the real risk calculation, exactly the way pips do that job in forex.
Thinking in ticks changes risk management
This habit of thinking in ticks has a direct consequence on risk management: futures position sizing isn't calculated as 'how many contracts do I want' but as 'how many ticks am I risking, times the tick value, times the number of contracts, brought back to my accepted risk percentage'. Skipping this step and picking a number of contracts by feel costs more here than elsewhere, precisely because built-in leverage amplifies every poorly sized position. Our futures calculator runs that division for the most actively traded contracts.
A journal that systematically logs the stop in ticks, the tick value of the contract traded, and the number of contracts lets you verify after the fact whether position size was genuinely consistent with the risk targeted, or whether it was picked without that calculation, a check that becomes a valuable habit once it's revealed one or two poorly sized trades. Writing that record down is not a detail: in the meta-analysis by Harkin and colleagues published in 2016 in Psychological Bulletin, across 138 studies and 19,951 participants, monitoring goal progress promoted goal attainment (d+ = 0.40), more so when the information was physically recorded; these were everyday goals, not trading goals.
Trading hours, a specific point not to forget
Many futures contracts trade over extended hours, with maintenance breaks and a volume that is not the same at every hour. The hours here come from a secondary source, a regulated US broker: according to Charles Schwab's page on E-mini Nasdaq futures, the contract trades from Sunday 6 p.m. to Friday 5 p.m. Eastern Time, with a daily maintenance period from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. In Europe, Eurex's page on DAX futures gives continuous trading from 02:10 to 22:00 Central European Time. A trader who only looks at aggregated statistics without accounting for session (overnight electronic session or main day session, for example) can miss performance gaps tied to the liquidity available at each point in the day.
As in forex, a 'session' or 'time window' field in the futures journal lets you check whether your edge genuinely holds during low-volume periods, or whether it mainly concentrates in windows with the strongest liquidity and participation, which has a direct impact on your orders' execution quality.
The margin call, an event to understand
When your account balance drops to or below the maintenance margin level because a position is moving against you, the broker issues a margin call: the CFTC Glossary defines it as a request from a brokerage firm to a customer to bring margin deposits up to initial levels, and adds that exchanges specify the initial and maintenance margin levels for each contract, while brokers may require more. If no deposit comes, the position can be liquidated: Charles Schwab's page on Micro E-mini futures, a secondary source, warns that the brokerage may liquidate your position without contacting you to meet a margin call, and the CFTC's page on the basics of futures trading that you can be required to pay more than you invested initially. Margin is security for the fulfillment of the contract, not a cap on losses, and the call can surprise a trader who hasn't closely tracked their available margin, particularly during a sharp market move.
A futures journal that notes, even after the fact, the moments when available margin dropped to a critical level lets you spot habits that bring you too close to that threshold too often, such as stacking several correlated positions or under-sizing your capital relative to your strategy. The slope has been measured: in the study by Coval and Shumway published in 2005 in the Journal of Finance, Chicago Board of Trade proprietary traders who had lost money in the morning were about 16 percent more likely to take above-average risk in the afternoon; these are professionals on a futures floor, not retail traders. It's valuable defensive information, distinct from the trade's result itself, that speaks directly to the robustness of your risk management rather than the quality of your analysis.
Mini and micro contracts, an entry point to track differently
Many futures markets offer, alongside the standard contract, mini or micro versions: the CFTC Glossary defines a mini as a futures contract that has a smaller contract size than an otherwise identical futures contract. Tick value follows size: 25, 5 and 1 euro per point on the DAX, Mini-DAX and Micro-DAX according to Eurex's page on DAX futures, and, according to Charles Schwab's page on Micro E-mini futures, a secondary source, one-tenth of the E-mini on US indices, that is $5 per point on the Micro E-mini S&P 500 against $50 on the E-mini. You therefore trade the same directional exposure with much lower currency risk per contract, which makes these reduced versions an entry point for discovering futures or testing a new strategy before moving to a larger size.
A journal that clearly distinguishes the contract size used (standard, mini, or micro) lets you honestly check whether results obtained at a small size hold up once size increases, or whether part of the apparent performance simply came from the risk at stake being too small to reveal real execution or discipline problems. It's a transition that deserves the same rigor of tracking as any other change to a risk parameter.
If you log the context of your trades, also date what you had in front of you: the Commitment of Traders report released on Friday describes Tuesday's positions, not those of the day you take your trade.
How Tradoshi helps with your futures journal
Tradoshi imports your futures trades and computes your statistics (R-multiple, expectancy, profit factor) accounting for the specifics of each instrument traded, so your performance read is never distorted by built-in leverage or currency conversion.
- Universal CSV import compatible with most futures trading platforms.
- R-multiple and expectancy computed independently of the contract size used.
- Position size calculator to tie your percentage risk to the number of contracts.
- Detailed journal to log rollover, session and context specific to futures.
Frequently asked questions
Why is futures leverage different from forex leverage?
Because it's built into the contract's own structure through the margin system: a modest deposit controls a much larger notional value, it's not a toggle you switch on or off like on a variable-leverage forex account. Every price move translates into an amplified result on the capital you actually committed.
Why track rollover in my futures journal?
Because approaching a contract's expiration forces you to close the position or roll it into the next contract, an operation with its own cost in spread and sometimes in price gap. Without logging it explicitly, this cost can be wrongly mistaken for a classic trading loss.
Why think in ticks rather than percentage on futures?
Because tick value, set by the exchange listing the contract, is the unit that directly matches how the contract is quoted. Converting a move to percentage without going through that value doesn't reflect your real result once the contract multiplier is applied.
How do I calculate my futures position size?
Starting from the stop in ticks, times the tick value of the contract, times the number of contracts, brought back to your accepted risk percentage. Picking a number of contracts by feel without that calculation is a costly mistake, precisely because built-in leverage amplifies the consequences of a poorly sized trade.
Do trading hours affect my futures performance?
Yes, many futures contracts trade over extended hours with a volume that is not the same at every hour. Without session tracking, you can miss that your edge actually concentrates during high-liquidity periods, or conversely degrades during thinner windows.
How does Tradoshi compute my futures stats?
Through CSV import compatible with most futures platforms, with R-multiple and expectancy calculations that account for each instrument's specifics, so your performance read stays reliable regardless of the contract size used.
What is a margin call and should I track it in my journal?
It's the broker's request to bring your margin deposit back up to the initial level when your balance drops to or below the maintenance margin level, and, failing that, a liquidation of positions. Noting the moments your available margin dropped to a critical level helps spot habits that bring you too close to that threshold too often, like stacking correlated positions.
Should I track mini and micro contracts separately from standard ones?
Yes. These reduced versions have a proportionally lower tick value and serve as an entry point for testing a strategy. Distinguishing the contract size used lets you honestly check whether results hold up once size increases.
Should I log commission fees on futures trades?
Yes, just like transaction fees in crypto or spread in forex. On futures, fees are counted per contract and per side: the NFA's page on its assessment fee gives, for instance, $0.01 per side per futures contract as of July 1, 2026, invoiced to the customer by their broker, who adds their own commission. On a strategy that trades frequently, these fees add up and can turn an edge that looks positive on paper into a neutral result once real costs are factored in.
Does the contract traded affect how I should log market context?
Yes. Each major futures family (indices, commodities, rates, currencies) follows different market dynamics, with its own catalysts for movement. Logging the contract family traded alongside your usual setup tag lets you check whether your edge holds up across underlying classes, or whether it's actually specific to just one type of contract.
Should I track volume and open interest in my futures journal?
It's useful context to note, at least qualitatively. The CFTC Glossary defines open interest as the total number of futures contracts, long or short, that have been entered into and not yet liquidated by an offsetting transaction or fulfilled by delivery. A contract traded with low volume and open interest can have messier execution than a heavily traded one, even if it remains technically listed and accessible. Comparing your performance across the most liquid and least liquid contracts on your usual list can reveal an execution factor hiding behind what looks like a setup variation.