New to trading? Start here
Garage Trades is about trading two futures contracts, NQ and MNQ, on NinjaTrader, a trading platform. The rest of the site uses a handful of words without stopping to explain them. This page explains the most common ones once, in the order they build on each other, before you open a guide.
Who we are
Traders sharing our process, not advisors. We trade NQ and MNQ and nothing else, and we build our own tools for NinjaTrader. Nothing here is advice, and we never tell anyone what to buy or sell.
A futures contract
An agreement to buy or sell something at a set price on a set date later on. Most traders never hold one to that date. They buy and sell the contract itself for the change in its price, and are out long before it expires. Each contract does expire, and trading moves to the next one before it does; the rollover guide covers that day.
NQ and MNQ
NQ is the E-mini Nasdaq-100 future. Its price follows the Nasdaq-100, an index of the largest companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange, and every point it moves is worth $20 on one contract. MNQ is its micro: tracking the same index, for a tenth of the money, $2 a point. Ten MNQ move as many dollars as one NQ.
A bar
A chart draws price as a row of bars (or candles). Each bar is one slice of trading, showing where price opened, how high and how low it went, and where it closed. When a guide says something happens "at bar close", it means once that slice is finished and can no longer change.
A tick and a point
Prices move in small fixed steps called ticks. On NQ and MNQ a tick is a quarter of a point, so four ticks make a point. That makes a tick $5.00 on NQ and $0.50 on MNQ. Always say ticks or points, never just the number: a 20 tick stop and a 20 point stop are four times apart in money. The NQ and MNQ guide has the full table.
A stop
An order you place in advance that gets you out of a trade if price reaches a level you chose. It gives a loss a size before the trade starts. It does not promise that exact price: in a fast market a stop can fill a few ticks worse, which the order types guide explains.
Risk and position size
Most of this site is about risk: deciding how much a trade can lose before you take it, and how many contracts that allows. The second half of that is arithmetic, and the position size calculator does it for you.
Order flow
The buying and selling inside each bar, trade by trade. A price chart shows where price went; order flow shows the trades that pushed it there. EDGEON, the indicator we build, reads order flow and marks what it finds on the chart. It is not out yet; its page says what it will do and what it never will.
NinjaTrader
NinjaTrader 8 is the trading platform we use: charts, orders and a simulator for practice, and its free plan covers charting and simulation. Our guides use its menus, EDGEON is built for it, and the Trade Lab reads the trade export it saves.
Where to go next
- The guides, each one problem, start to finish. Order types is a good first one.
- The Trade Lab, a free page that reads a NinjaTrader trade export and works out your expectancy (what a trade made or lost on average), win rate and averages in your browser, with nothing uploaded. No export yet? It has a sample session to try.
- The calculators: tick value, position size, expectancy and risk of ruin, worked out in your browser.
- The Garage Playbook, eighteen printable pages of risk rules and routines, free with one confirmation click.
Sources checked
- CME Group, E-mini Nasdaq-100 contract specifications: $20 × the Nasdaq-100 Index, a minimum fluctuation of 0.25 index points = $5.00, product code NQ.
- CME Group, Micro E-mini Nasdaq-100 contract specifications: $2 × the Nasdaq-100 Index, a minimum fluctuation of 0.25 index points = $0.50, product code MNQ.