Your first 90 days in futures

Everything in this course reduces to a schedule. The schedule is deliberately slow, because the two things that end futures accounts, size and impatience, are the two things a schedule constrains. Nothing below promises a result. It promises that at day 90 you will know, from your own log, whether you have something worth continuing.

Before day 1: the setup checklist

Item	Done when
One product chosen (MES, MNQ or MCL)	Written in the plan with its tick value, point value, hours and settlement time
Contract calendar	Next two roll dates and, for MCL, last trading day, in your calendar
Broker rules	Day-trade margin, cut-off time, liquidation policy and fee per contract written down
Data and platform	Real-time subscription active; monthly fixed cost recorded
Bracket template	Stop and 2R target in ticks saved; tested on the simulator
Daily loss lock	Set at 3R on the platform
Risk plan from the risk course	Updated with account leverage caps: intraday and overnight (overnight likely zero for now)
Economic calendar	Weekly review scheduled
Log	Columns for date, session, entry, stop ticks, contracts, realized R after costs, notes

Days 1 to 14: simulator, platform and hours

Goal: know the platform cold and the product's daily rhythm. Not profit.

Trade the simulator during RTH only, one contract, bracket every time.
Place every order type from Module 6, Lesson 2 at least once, including a manual exit that must cancel the bracket.
Sit through the 9:30 am open, a settlement window and one 8:30 am release without trading; watch what happens to the spread and the fills.
Log every simulated trade in realized R as if it were real. The point is the habit.

At the end of two weeks you should be able to explain your product's tick value, settlement time, roll date and your broker's cut-off from memory, and to place a bracket in under five seconds.

Days 15 to 60: one micro, real money, 40 trades

Goal: a logged sample of at least 40 real trades at a size that cannot hurt you.

Rule	Setting
Size	One micro contract, no exceptions, even when the budget allows more
Risk	Stop from the chart; if one micro exceeds 1% of the account, skip
Session	RTH only, and not the first two minutes
Overnight	None; flat by the broker's cut-off
Daily limit	3R, locked on the platform
Events	Flat 10 minutes before and after scheduled releases; flat on FOMC days
Roll	Switch contracts on roll day; no positions across it

One micro on a $5,000 account with a 6-point MES stop is $30 of risk, or 0.6%. The dollars will feel meaningless; that is the design. Forty trades at $30 is at most $1,200 of exposure over six weeks, and a strategy that cannot survive that sample has told you something worth far more than $1,200.

Day 60: the first review

Compute from the log, using the risk course's definitions:

Win rate and average win and loss in realized R.
Expectancy per trade.
Longest losing streak and the maximum drawdown in R.
Average slippage per trade in ticks, and commission as a percentage of R.
Number of rule breaks: size, session, daily limit, events, roll.

Then decide by the numbers:

Result	Action for days 61 to 90
Expectancy positive, zero or one rule break	Continue at one micro; consider two if the 1% budget allows at the same stop
Expectancy positive, several rule breaks	Continue at one micro; fix the rule breaks first; size is not the problem
Expectancy negative, few rule breaks	The strategy is the problem; back to the simulator to change it, not the size
Expectancy negative, many rule breaks	Stop trading live; work on the rules in the simulator for a month

The most common wrong move at this review is to add contracts because the last ten trades were good. Ten trades is noise. Forty is barely a sample. The scaling rule is account growth, not recent results.

Key idea: Ninety days buys you a platform you know, a product you understand, and a 40-plus trade log in realized R at a size that cannot hurt you. The decision at the end is made from the log, not from how it felt.

Days 61 to 90: continue, adjust, and think about capital

Trade the same plan. If the review permitted it and the account's 1% budget covers it at your stop, two micros. Continue logging.

Use this period to decide the capital question honestly. There are three routes and each has a cost:

Grow the personal account. Slow, safe, and the returns on a small account in micros are small in dollars. The cost is patience.
Buy a prop evaluation with the log as evidence, sized at 2% to 5% of the drawdown as Lesson 3 showed. The cost is fees and the trailing drawdown's constraints.
Keep the account small and treat futures as a skill under development, which is a legitimate answer for most people at day 90.

None of them involves a full-size contract, holding overnight or the Asian session; those are decisions for a later review with a larger sample and account.

The day-90 document

At day 90 write one page:

Product, session, stop and target in ticks, and size rule.
Expectancy, win rate, longest streak and max drawdown from the log.
Fixed monthly costs and commission as a percentage of R.
Account leverage caps, intraday and overnight.
The specific condition under which size will next change.
The specific condition under which you will stop.

That page is the risk course's one-page plan, with futures numbers in it. Everything in this course was in service of being able to fill it in from evidence.

Try it: Fill in the setup checklist above today. Every row has a concrete deliverable. Then put the day-14, day-60 and day-90 review dates in your calendar and write the one sentence you will use to decide size at day 60 before you have taken a single trade.

Recap

Before day 1: one product, calendar dates, broker rules, data, bracket template, loss lock, updated risk plan, log.
Days 1 to 14: simulator for platform and hours, not for profit.
Days 15 to 60: one micro, RTH only, no overnight, flat for events and rolls, 40 logged trades in realized R.
Day 60: compute expectancy, streaks, slippage, rule breaks; decide from the table, never from the last ten trades.
Days 61 to 90: continue, at most two micros, and decide the capital route; write the day-90 one-page document.