CME Group listed E-nano equity index futures on 24 August 2026, covering the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, Russell 2000 and Dow Jones Industrial Average at one tenth the size of a Micro E-mini. NinjaTrader and Robinhood were the only two platforms CME named at announcement.
Almost every write-up leads with that size. It is accurate and it is the least useful number in the specification. The tick is not one tenth. CME set the E-nano tick at double the index-point increment of its Micro and E-mini counterparts, so the dollar value of a tick falls by five while the contract falls by ten. Your position gets ten times smaller and your price resolution gets twice as coarse at the same moment.
This covers the verified specifications, what that gap does to your cost per trade now that real commission schedules can be checked against it, and what to confirm on NinjaTrader. Every contract figure comes from CME’s own published FAQ.
What the launch settled, and what it did not
Worth stating up front, because a lot of the coverage still online was written before the contracts existed.
Settled. The contracts listed on schedule. Regulatory review cleared. The two listed months are September and December 2026, on the standard quarterly cycle. The specifications published in the August announcement are the specifications that went live, unchanged.
Not settled. CME margin figures, broker commissions and prop firm equivalency rules were the three open questions before launch. All three remain open, which is itself worth knowing, because several guides published in early August promised to fill them in at launch and have not.
The rest of this page treats those three as open and tells you how to get the answer yourself for each.
E-nano futures contract specs
| Product | Code | Multiplier | Tick size | Value per tick |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E-nano S&P 500 | NES | $0.50 | 0.50 index points | $0.25 |
| E-nano Nasdaq-100 | NNQ | $0.20 | 0.50 index points | $0.10 |
| E-nano Russell 2000 | N2K | $0.50 | 0.20 index points | $0.10 |
| E-nano Dow Jones | NDOW | $0.05 | 2.00 index points | $0.10 |
NES, NNQ and N2K list under CME. NDOW lists under CBOT, which matches how the Micro and E-mini versions are already split. Both are Chicago designated contract markets, but they are separate ones, and that matters when you pull margin or fee schedules by exchange.
The rest of the mechanics, from the same source. Financially settled against the Special Opening Quotation on the contract month’s third Friday, the same print that settles the E-mini and the Micro. Only the nearest two quarterly months list at any time, from the March, June, September and December cycle, which currently means September and December 2026. Trading runs Sunday 6:00 p.m. through Friday 5:00 p.m. Eastern, with the daily maintenance break from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. Daily settlement comes from a 30-second volume-weighted average of Globex trades in the corresponding E-mini between 3:59:30 and 4:00:00 p.m. Eastern, rounded to the nearest E-nano tick. Price limits and circuit breakers follow the same rules as the larger contracts.
Two exclusions to know before building around them: E-nano contracts are not eligible for block trading or BTIC, and E-nano volume does not count toward CME’s volume-based fee discounts.
E-nano vs Micro E-mini vs E-mini
The three sizes side by side, using CME’s figures:
| E-nano | Micro E-mini | E-mini | |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 multiplier | $0.50 | $5 | $50 |
| Nasdaq-100 multiplier | $0.20 | $2 | $20 |
| Russell 2000 multiplier | $0.50 | $5 | $50 |
| Dow multiplier | $0.05 | $0.50 | $5 |
| S&P 500 tick size | 0.50 pts | 0.25 pts | 0.25 pts |
| S&P 500 tick value | $0.25 | $1.25 | $12.50 |
| Underlying index | Same | Same | Same |
| Settlement | SOQ, third Friday | SOQ, third Friday | SOQ, third Friday |
| Session | 23 hours | 23 hours | 23 hours |
Notional exposure follows the multiplier. At a hypothetical S&P 500 level of 7,000, one E-nano carries about $3,500 of exposure against roughly $35,000 for a Micro and $350,000 for an E-mini. Those figures move with the index and are illustrative only.
One detail worth having if you run mixed sizes: CME allows E-nano positions to be offset against opposing positions in their counterparts, at 10:1 against Micro E-minis and 100:1 against E-minis. Offsets go through your clearing broker to the clearinghouse rather than happening automatically.
The E-nano tick value math most coverage skips
The multiplier drops by ten. The tick doubles. Together those two published facts mean the dollar value of one tick drops by five, not ten, and it holds identically across all four contracts.
| Index | E-nano tick value | Micro E-mini tick value | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | $0.25 | $1.25 | 5x smaller |
| Nasdaq-100 | $0.10 | $0.50 | 5x smaller |
| Russell 2000 | $0.10 | $0.50 | 5x smaller |
| Dow Jones | $0.10 | $0.50 | 5x smaller |
The missing factor of two turns up as price resolution. An E-nano moves in index-point steps twice as wide as a Micro. On the S&P 500 you quote and stop in half-point increments rather than quarter-point. On the Dow it is two-point steps rather than one.
That is a real trade-off and it runs against how the product is being sold. A smaller contract buys finer control over exposure. It costs coarser control over price. If your method depends on precise stop placement more than on precise position sizing, E-nano hands you the thing you did not need and takes away the thing you did.
It is also being described loosely elsewhere. At least one broker guide currently ranking says the tick value “still lands close to what a Micro trader is used to.” Measured against a pure one-tenth scaling that is fair, since $0.25 is more than $0.125. Read plainly it is misleading: twenty-five cents against a dollar twenty-five is one fifth, not close. Work from CME’s table.
What E-nano futures actually cost to trade
Exchange fees aside, the number that decides whether these are tradeable is your broker’s per-contract commission. No broker has published an E-nano-specific rate. NinjaTrader’s commission schedule states it is current as of 14 August 2026 and is updated quarterly, which puts the published version before the contracts listed.
What is published is the plan structure, and that is enough to run the arithmetic. NinjaTrader charges $0.39 per side on Micro contracts on the free plan, $0.29 on the $99 monthly plan, and $0.09 on the lifetime licence. Exchange, clearing and NFA fees are charged on top of all three.
If E-nano is billed at the Micro rate, here is what a round turn costs in ticks:
| Plan | Per side | Round turn | Ticks to cover on NES | Ticks to cover on MES |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0.39 | $0.78 | 3.1 | 0.6 |
| Monthly, $99 | $0.29 | $0.58 | 2.3 | 0.5 |
| Lifetime, $1,499 | $0.09 | $0.18 | 0.7 | 0.1 |
Read it in index points and the gap is starker. On the free plan an NES position has to move 1.56 index points before commission is covered. An MES position on the same plan needs 0.156. Ten times the market movement for a tenth of the exposure, and that ratio holds at every tier.
So the commission cost per dollar of notional is ten times higher on the nano than on the Micro at the same per-contract rate. Not slightly worse. Ten times. That is the number that decides whether these contracts are a tool or a toll.
There is a floor under this, and it is structural. For commission to be neutral per unit of exposure, a nano rate would have to be one tenth of the Micro rate: about four cents per side on the free plan. Exchange, clearing and NFA fees are charged per contract and do not scale with contract size at all, so they sit underneath any commission a broker sets. A tenth-sized contract runs into that floor far sooner than a Micro does. A perfectly proportional nano commission may not be possible for anyone to offer, which is worth knowing before you wait for one to appear.
That does not make the contracts useless. It makes them a sizing instrument rather than a scalping instrument. If you hold for tens of points, three ticks of commission drag is noise. If you scalp two ticks on a Micro, the nano version of that trade does not survive the fee.
Ask your broker for one number before you size anything: the all-in round turn on NES, commission and exchange fees together. Set it beside the twenty-five cent tick and the answer is immediate.
E-nano is not the only small CME contract, and the symbols look alike
This one catches people, and it is worth a paragraph because the two products are unrelated.
CME also lists Spot-Quoted futures, a separate family covering the same four equity indices plus four cryptocurrencies. The Globex codes are QSPX for the S&P 500, QNDX for the Nasdaq-100, QRTY for the Russell 2000 and a Dow equivalent alongside them. They are also marketed as smaller-sized contracts, and they launched in the same year, which is why searches for the smallest available index contract return both.
They work differently in ways that matter. Spot-Quoted futures are priced at or near the underlying cash index level rather than at a futures price, they do not carry a quarterly expiry to roll, and their daily settlement comes from the cash index settlement rather than from a related contract’s VWAP. E-nano is a conventional quarterly contract that settles against the Special Opening Quotation on the third Friday, exactly like the E-mini and Micro do.
If you are searching symbols on a platform, NNQ is the E-nano Nasdaq-100 and QNDX is the Spot-Quoted Nasdaq-100. They are not the same instrument, they do not have the same expiry behaviour, and a bot pointed at the wrong one will not tell you it is wrong.
E-nano futures on NinjaTrader: what to check
NinjaTrader’s CEO is quoted in CME’s announcement and the platform is one of two CME named, so its users are well placed for access. That said, a contract being listed by the exchange and being enabled, symbol-mapped and priced on a platform are separate steps. Four things worth confirming rather than assuming.
The instruments exist and are subscribed. NES, NNQ, N2K and NDOW are new instruments. Confirm they appear, and confirm your market data subscription covers them. CME and CBOT are separate designated contract markets, and NDOW sits on CBOT while the other three sit on CME.
You have the right symbol. Check that you are on NES rather than QSPX, or NNQ rather than QNDX, per the section above. Two families of small index contracts arrived within months of each other and the codes are easy to confuse in a symbol search.
Only two contract months list. September and December 2026 at the time of writing, and nothing further out. If you use continuous contracts or automatic rolls, that is a shorter ladder than the Micro and E-mini series you are used to.
Your simulator uses real specs. Practising on the wrong tick value teaches the wrong position size. Check that the simulated instrument carries a $0.25 tick on NES rather than inheriting a Micro’s $1.25.
What changes for automated traders
If you trade discretionarily, a listing is a small event. If you run automation, a new contract size touches more of the stack than people expect, and one of these failure modes is silent.
Hard-coded tick values are the dangerous one. If your sizing or risk module has $1.25 or $0.50 per tick written into it anywhere, pointing it at an E-nano produces a position five times larger than intended in tick terms. It does not error. It just runs, and it runs in the direction of more risk.
Tick-denominated stops change meaning. A ten-tick stop on MES is 2.5 index points. A ten-tick stop on NES is 5.0 index points. Same number, double the market distance. Convert stops and targets to index points and re-derive them rather than copying across.
Settlement comes from somewhere else. E-nano daily settlement is derived from the E-mini’s VWAP, not from E-nano trades. If any reconciliation step assumes an instrument settles off its own tape, that assumption does not hold here.
Commission is now part of your sizing logic. On a Micro, a round turn costs a fraction of a tick and most strategies can ignore it in backtests. On a nano at the same rate it is three ticks on the entry-level plan. Any strategy that was marginally profitable on Micros will not survive being ported to nanos without the fee modelled explicitly.
Backtests still flatter you. There is only a few days of E-nano price history. A backtest on Micro data with the multiplier scaled down models the fills you would have got in a deep book, not the ones you will get in a new one, and it models a commission structure that does not apply.
E-nano futures for prop firm traders
This is the group with the most to gain and the least published information, and that has not changed since launch.
The mechanical appeal is clear. Evaluation accounts live inside fixed daily loss limits and trailing drawdowns, and contract granularity decides how you scale inside them. A contract one tenth the size of a Micro gives you ten times the steps within the same drawdown budget, which matters when the difference between passing and failing is one oversized trade.
What is still unpublished is how firms count them. Every firm maintains a contract-equivalency table setting how each size counts toward position limits, and no major firm appears to have stated where E-nano lands. Whether it counts as a tenth of a Micro, gets its own category, or is excluded during evaluations is still open, days after listing.
There is a reason to expect firms to move slowly here, and it is the commission floor above. Firms pay flat per-contract clearing costs. On a contract a tenth the size, those costs come out of their margin rather than yours, and a trader taking ten nanos instead of one Micro costs the firm roughly ten times as much to clear for the same exposure. A favourable equivalency ratio is expensive for them to offer.
Ask your firm directly rather than assuming. The firms that answer clearly are telling you something useful about how carefully they think.
What is still unpublished
Short list, and worth more than the confident parts.
Margins. CME’s FAQ directs traders to its margins page rather than quoting figures, and margins move with market conditions in any case. Check CME’s margins page and then check your broker’s, because brokers set their own intraday and maintenance requirements on top of the exchange minimum and those differ significantly between them. Do not assume a clean one tenth of the Micro requirement.
Commissions. No broker has published an E-nano-specific rate. NinjaTrader’s own schedule predates the listing and updates quarterly.
Prop firm equivalency. Unpublished across the major firms.
Liquidity. A few days of trading is not enough to characterise a book. Spreads and depth on any new listing are their own thing, and the honest answer is to watch the volume data for several weeks before assuming these trade like Micros do.
We will update this page when each of those is answered rather than estimating in the meantime.
Does E-nano change your infrastructure needs?
Our honest read, as a company that hosts NinjaTrader and other futures platforms for automated traders.
Mostly no, and we would rather say so. E-nano exists because index levels priced retail out of Micros. That is a position-sizing problem rather than an execution-speed one, and a smaller contract does not make a fill arrive sooner. If you trade one or two E-nanos by hand from a laptop, nothing about this listing means you need hosting.
What does not change is the case that already existed: automated strategies that must run while you are away, that cannot survive a dropped connection mid-position, and that suffer when a home connection adds variability to order submission. A thin new book adds one specific version of that, because an interrupted session costs most when depth is unpredictable.
The useful preparation is not faster hardware. It is correct symbol mappings, correct tick values, converted stops, commission modelled into your sizing, and something that stays up through the session. If you want a baseline on your current path first, our latency checker gives you a zero-install read, and we would rather you measure than take anyone’s word for a number, ours included.
All four contracts clear in Chicago, on CME and CBOT respectively, which is the argument for our Chicago location if proximity to the matching engine matters to your strategy. Platform setup, including NinjaTrader preinstalled and configured, is covered on our NinjaTrader VPS page. If you are weighing providers rather than platforms, our futures VPS comparison ranks the field and discloses up front that we are one of the entries in it.
How we checked this
Worth stating plainly, because a lot of what is published about E-nano was written before the contracts existed and has not been revisited since.
Every contract figure on this page was read from CME Group’s own E-nano FAQ and its 3 August announcement, both in full rather than in summary. The multipliers, tick sizes, tick values, product codes, exchange listings, trading hours, settlement method, offset ratios and the block, BTIC and volume-discount exclusions are CME’s published numbers. The Spot-Quoted comparison comes from CME’s Spot-Quoted futures FAQ and its published technical document, which is where the Globex codes come from.
The tick-value comparison, the price-resolution point and the commission arithmetic are ours. We derived them from CME’s spec table and NinjaTrader’s published plan rates, and we checked that the ratios hold across all four contracts rather than only the S&P 500 example. Where a figure is our calculation rather than a published one, the copy says so.
An earlier version of this page said commission drag per unit of exposure roughly doubles under a flat per-contract rate. That was wrong and it is corrected above. At the same commission, a contract carrying a tenth of the exposure costs ten times as much per dollar of notional, not twice. The five-times-as-many-ticks figure alongside it was correct and is unchanged.
Where something is unpublished, we say it is unpublished instead of estimating. Margins, broker commissions and prop firm equivalency rules all remain in that category. We would rather send you to CME and your broker than publish a number that turns out to be wrong.
What we bring beyond the reading is the adjacent part: we host NinjaTrader and other futures platforms for automated traders, and we spend a lot of time measuring execution paths and watching what breaks when a platform or a contract changes underneath a running strategy. That is where the automation section comes from.
Frequently Asked Questions
E-nano futures are CME Group equity index contracts listed on 24 August 2026 at one tenth the size of Micro E-mini futures and one hundredth the size of full E-mini futures. They cover the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, Russell 2000 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, are financially settled, and trade nearly 23 hours a day on the same schedule as their larger counterparts.
Twenty-five cents on the E-nano S&P 500 and ten cents on the Nasdaq-100, Russell 2000 and Dow Jones contracts. That is one fifth of the equivalent Micro E-mini tick rather than one tenth, because CME set the E-nano tick at double the index-point increment while the multiplier fell by ten.
The multiplier is ten times smaller, so notional exposure and dollar risk per index point both fall by ten. The tick is twice as wide in index points, so each tick is worth one fifth as much and your price resolution is half as fine. The underlying index, settlement method and trading hours are identical.
NES for the S&P 500, NNQ for the Nasdaq-100, N2K for the Russell 2000 and NDOW for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. NES, NNQ and N2K list under CME; NDOW lists under CBOT.
No. NNQ is the E-nano Nasdaq-100 contract. QNDX is the Spot-Quoted Nasdaq-100, part of a separate CME family that is priced at the cash index level and does not carry a quarterly expiry. Both are marketed as smaller-sized index contracts and both arrived in 2026, which is why the codes get confused in symbol searches.
September and December 2026 at the time of writing. CME lists only the nearest two quarterly months from the March, June, September and December cycle, which is a shorter ladder than the Micro and E-mini series carry.
NinjaTrader is one of two platforms CME named at announcement, alongside Robinhood, and its CEO is quoted in the launch release. Listing and platform enablement are separate steps, so confirm the symbols appear, that your data subscription covers them, and what commission rate applies before the first session.
CME has not published E-nano margin figures, and its FAQ directs traders to the margins page rather than quoting a number. Margins also move with market conditions, and brokers set their own intraday and maintenance requirements on top of the exchange minimum. Check both, and do not assume a clean one tenth of the Micro requirement.
No broker has published an E-nano-specific rate. If a broker charges the same flat per-contract rate as on a Micro, a round turn costs about three ticks on NES at entry-level pricing against roughly half a tick on a Micro, and commission per dollar of notional exposure is ten times higher. Ask your broker for the all-in round turn on NES, commission and exchange fees together.
Exchange, clearing and NFA fees are charged per contract and do not scale with contract size, so they sit underneath whatever commission a broker sets. A tenth-sized contract hits that floor much sooner than a Micro does, which means a perfectly proportional nano commission may not be possible for anyone to offer.
Not at Micro-rate commissions. A round turn costs around three ticks on NES at entry-level pricing, so a two-tick scalp loses money before the market moves. They suit position sizing and holding through larger moves rather than taking small increments out of the book.
Yes. CME allows E-nano positions to be offset against opposing positions in their counterparts at 10:1 against Micro E-mini futures and 100:1 against E-mini futures. Offsets are executed by asking your clearing broker to submit a request to the clearinghouse.
Still unpublished across the major firms. Each maintains a contract-equivalency table setting how each size counts toward position limits, and none appears to have stated where E-nano sits. Firms also pay flat per-contract clearing costs, so a favourable ratio is expensive for them to offer. Ask your firm directly.
No. CME states that E-nano volume does not count toward its existing volume-based fee discounts. The contracts are also not eligible for block trading or BTIC.
They are financially settled against the Special Opening Quotation on the third Friday of the contract month, the same print that settles the E-mini and Micro E-mini. Only the nearest two quarterly months are listed at any time.
Not because of the contract size. E-nano solves a position-sizing problem, not an execution-speed one, and a smaller contract does not make a fill arrive sooner. Hosting matters for the same reasons it did before: automation that has to keep running while you are away and cannot afford a dropped connection, which is worth more than usual while a new book is still thin.
Confirm the four symbols exist and are not confused with the Spot-Quoted codes, confirm your data subscription covers them, get your all-in round turn from your broker, replace any hard-coded tick values in sizing or risk code, convert tick-denominated stops into index points and re-derive them, and check that your simulator carries the real E-nano tick rather than inheriting a Micro’s.
Contract specifications, product codes, settlement mechanics, offset ratios and exclusions come from CME Group’s published E-nano FAQ and its 3 August 2026 announcement. The Spot-Quoted comparison comes from CME’s Spot-Quoted futures FAQ and technical document. Commission figures are NinjaTrader’s published plan rates; the tick, index-point and per-notional comparisons are our own arithmetic from those rates and CME’s spec table. Margins are unpublished, no broker has published an E-nano-specific commission, and prop firm treatment is unpublished, so verify current details with CME, your broker and your firm before trading. This is infrastructure and educational content, not trading or financial advice.
