How much money do you actually need to start

The honest answer is about $100.

That number is real, and it is also the most misleading sentence on this page unless you read the rest of it. Because $100 is what it costs to start. It is not what it costs to keep going, and it is not the number you need if you'd rather trade your own money instead of somebody else's.

There are two roads into this. They cost completely different amounts, they fail in completely different ways, and almost nobody explains the second one honestly. So let's do the math out loud.

Two roads, and only one of them needs savings

Road two: you open a futures account at a broker with your own money, post margin, and trade. Nobody sets rules for you. Nobody takes a cut. Nobody hands you $50,000 to work with, either.

Neither road is the "right" one. Road one asks how little you can risk to find out whether a system works for you. Road two asks how much freedom you're willing to pay for.

The arithmetic on that stretch

Put both halves of that period together, because one without the other is propaganda.

Two things need saying immediately. First, that is an average across four and three-quarter years, not a forecast for any single one: some stretches were far better and some were far worse, and the average hides both. Second, all of it is simulated. No real money was at risk, and no account was actually bought or lost. The numbers come from running the strategy over historical data, day by day.

Road two: your own account

Now the road nobody prices honestly. To trade micro index futures in your own name you need a futures account at a broker, and you need to post margin.

Margin is not a fee and not a purchase. It's a good-faith deposit the exchange requires you to have sitting in the account while a position is open. There are two flavors, and confusing them is how people get hurt:

• Initial and maintenance margin is what the exchange requires to hold a position, including overnight. On a micro index contract it has run in the low four figures per contract in recent years. The exchange resets it when volatility changes, sometimes sharply and with little notice.
• Day-trade margin is a much smaller number your broker offers if you promise to be flat before the close. Some brokers advertise as little as a few hundred dollars, or less, per micro contract. It is a broker courtesy, not an exchange rule, and it disappears the moment you hold past the session.

A system that never holds overnight, with no position carried into the next session, lives entirely inside day-trade margin. That's exactly why it can be run in a small account. And it's exactly why a small account is a trap.

Day-trade margin is not the number that matters

Suppose your broker lets you trade one micro contract on $500 of day-trade margin. Can you open an account with $500 and start? Technically yes. Practically no, and here is the arithmetic that says so.

So your account has to hold the margin and absorb a drawdown of that size without dropping below margin, without triggering a margin call, and without you panicking and switching the system off at the bottom. A working rule: size the account at two to three times the worst historical drawdown, on top of margin. On one micro contract that puts you somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000. And it should be money that can go to zero without changing how you live.

That's the honest gap between the two roads. Not $100 versus $500. It's $100 versus roughly $10,000.

The costs neither road escapes

Whichever road you take, four line items show up:

1. The system itself. A one-time license for the strategy. Prices are on the pricing page, not buried in a funnel.
2. The platform. NinjaTrader 8 is free to download, chart and simulate with. Live trading needs a paid tier or higher per-trade rates. The full breakdown is in NinjaTrader 8 explained.
3. A machine that stays on. Your own computer, awake and connected at 9:30 AM ET, or a small virtual private server for a few dollars a month so you never have to think about it.

So what is the actual number?

What you should not do is start on the second road with the first road's budget. A $2,000 account trading one micro on day-trade margin isn't aggressive. It's an account that gets closed by a drawdown the system was always going to have. How that drawdown behaves, month by month, is on the risk page.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need $25,000 like the pattern day trader rule says?

No. The $25,000 minimum equity rule applies to pattern day trading in stock and options margin accounts, not to futures. Futures have their own margin framework set by the exchange and the broker. That said, the fact that a small futures account is legal doesn't make it survivable. Size it off the drawdown, not the rulebook.

Educational content, not investment advice. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Any reference to Algomyth results is hypothetical, simulated over historical data, and shown in full on the performance page; past performance does not guarantee future results.