How many contracts? Price the stop in dollars first

The chain is three steps. Stop distance divided by tick size gives ticks: 12 Nasdaq points ÷ 0.25 = 48 ticks. Ticks times tick value gives dollar risk per contract: 48 × $0.50 = $24 on MNQ. Risk budget divided by that, rounded down, gives whole contracts: $180 ÷ $24 = 7.5, so seven contracts, committing $168 of the $180. Rounding down is the budget holding; rounding up to eight would put $192 at risk, $12 past the number you set.

Run the same stop through NQ and the division returns zero: $180 ÷ $240 rounds down to nothing, because one contract already exceeds the budget by $60. Zero is a complete answer, it tells you that at this stop and this budget the full-size contract is unaffordable, and the decisions it leaves open are the micro, a deliberately revised account-level budget, or no trade. One more input rule: a 12.1-point stop does not sit on the 0.25-point exchange grid, and fixing the entry beats letting a tool round it, because rounding the stop silently moves the price where your idea is wrong.

MNQ and NQ both tick in 0.25 index points; the tick is worth $0.50 on the micro and $5.00 on the full-size. That single number is the entire gap between the example's $24 and $240. MES and ES repeat the pattern: a 0.25-point tick worth $1.25 and $12.50 respectively, per the CME contract specifications this guide sources. Because the charts are identical, the tick value is the only place that gap lives, so look it up for the exact symbol before the order goes in.

Metals break the copy-paste harder: gold and silver contracts use different tick sizes and tick values from the index pairs and from each other, so an index spreadsheet reused on a gold micro produces confidently wrong dollars. Even inside the index group the tick size moves, the Dow pair ticks in whole index points. Pull the exchange specification for the exact symbol you will trade. NANO's sizer covers the paired USD contracts for the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, Dow Jones, gold and silver, with the specs loaded from the sources listed below.

You want three NQ. Run the example's $180 budget backwards and each contract may risk $60, which is 12 ticks, a 3-point Nasdaq stop. That stop was placed by the budget, at whatever price makes three contracts affordable, and it no longer marks where the trade idea fails. The order that protects the thesis is fixed: place the stop on the chart first, then let the division tell you which contract class and how many fit under it.

The budget itself sits under ceilings the formula does not see. On an evaluation or funded account (an eval is the tryout phase you pay to attempt; funded is the phase that can pay out) the per-trade budget has to fit inside the remaining drawdown the firm's rules leave you, inside a daily loss limit where the firm publishes one, and beside the risk already sitting in stops on open trades. The mechanism is subtraction before division: with $120 of stop risk already open under a $180 per-trade ceiling, the next trade sizes against $60, which at the example's $24-per-contract stop buys two MNQ where the untouched budget allowed seven.