Free tool
How many contracts actually fit your risk?
Pick the instrument, say what you're willing to lose on the trade and where your stop goes. No sign-up, nothing stored. It runs entirely in your browser.
Risking $240 if the stop fills, $60 of the budget unused. Each contract is $80 at this stop.
- STOP
- 160 ticks
- 40 pts
- PER CONTRACT
- $80
- POINT VALUE
- $2
Always rounds down. Rounding up would breach the budget you just set, which is the one thing a sizing tool must never do.
Why “max 5 contracts” doesn't mean anything
Every prop firm caps contracts, and every trader treats that cap as a risk rule. It isn't one. A contract cap is instrument-blind, so the same number is a different amount of money on every symbol. Against a $1,000 daily loss limit, fully inside a 5-contract cap:
| POSITION | STOP | AT RISK | OF A $1,000 DAY |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 × MES | 10 pts | $250 | 25% |
| 5 × MNQ | 40 pts | $400 | 40% |
| 5 × ES | 10 pts | $2,500 | 250% |
| 5 × NQ | 40 pts | $4,000 | 400% |
A sixteen-fold spread, under one rule. You can be fully compliant with your firm's contract cap and lose four times your daily limit on a single trade — and the cap will not have said a word. That is not a missing feature. It is a rule that does not do what it promises.
The arithmetic, if you want to check it
Everything is computed in whole ticks, never in points. In points, 0.015 / 0.001 evaluates to 14.999999999999998, and that error then travels into the tick count, the dollar figure and the contract number — on NG, CL, RTY and the yen, which is to say on the instruments where nobody would spot it.
Risk is a multiplication of the tick count, never stopPoints × pointValue: every tick value is an exact binary fraction, so the first is exact and the second is not. Point values here are derived from tick size and tick value rather than stored, because two numbers that must agree are one number that cannot disagree.
The tool
This is the same maths that watches your account.
LastLoss runs this arithmetic against every fill in real time. It asks where your stop usually goes, sets a contract cap per instrument that your loss limit can survive, and calls you out the moment you exceed it — while you can still trim. It connects to Tradovate read-only and never places an order.
The calculator above and the app share one instrument table and one set of test vectors; the build fails if they ever disagree.
Download the free betaContract specifications change. Verify tick size and tick value against CME's published specs before sizing a real position. This page is arithmetic, not advice.