How to trade NQ on MetaTrader 5 (real setup)

Before anything else, settle the question that the whole rest of the setup depends on: is this the exchange-traded futures contract, or is it a derivative of it wearing a similar name? The platform will tell you outright, in one window, in two fields. You do not have to take anybody’s word for it, including mine.

This is the paragraph that ought to be the first result for the question and instead is nowhere. On my own account — Darwinex, legal entity Tradeslide Trading Tech Limited, server Darwinex-Live — real-time CME data costs 7.00 US dollars a month at the time of writing, charged by the broker rather than being a CME fee passed through at cost. It is worth saying plainly that this is cheap for live exchange data — cheap enough that it changes the decision for a lot of people who assumed real futures data on a retail platform would run to three figures.

Treat the number as a snapshot, not a constant. Fees change, and they change per broker, per data package and per account type. Check yours where the broker publishes it before you plan around it.

How you actually switch it on

This part is short and it is the part every thread leaves out. The subscription is arranged with the broker, not inside MetaTrader 5. There is no menu in the terminal that sells you exchange data. Ask your broker for their CME real-time data package — through the client area or through support, whichever they run — and get them to confirm in writing exactly which exchange and which package the fee covers before you pay it.

Then confirm it took effect the only way that means anything: open a chart on the same symbol again. It either draws or it does not. If it does not, go back to check 2 in section 01, because a subscription cannot make a contract-for-difference into an exchange contract.

The second subscription nobody warns you about

Exchange data entitlement is licensed per platform. It is not an account-level permission that follows you around — it is a licence to receive that exchange’s data inside one piece of software. So if you execute in MetaTrader 5 and do your analysis somewhere else, you are buying real-time CME data twice.

That is exactly what I pay. At the time of writing it is 7.00 US dollars a month to the broker for the data inside MetaTrader 5, plus 9.00 US dollars a month to the charting platform for the data inside that, which is 16.00 a month in total. Both figures are snapshots and both will move.

It is not waste, and it is not avoidable by being clever. If you only execute, you pay the first one. If you only study charts, you pay the second one. If your indicators live on one platform and your orders live on the other, you pay both, and it is far better to know that before you build the setup than on the month the second charge appears.

The reason people cannot find NQ is that there is no symbol called NQ. A futures contract is not one instrument; it is a series of them, one per delivery month, and the platform names each one individually. The convention here is a root, an underscore, and the standard CME month letter. Search the View → Symbols dialog for the root and read back what it returns.

So NQ_U is the E-mini Nasdaq-100 September contract. Not “NQ”. Not “the front month”. September, specifically, and it will stop being the one you want at a date you have to know in advance — which is section 09.

Which raises the question everybody asks next: can you not just chart a continuous contract and forget the letters? Not here. Searching that dialog for NQ returned one symbol, NQ_U. There is no continuous symbol, no back-adjusted series, and no perpetual to fall back on — and the NQ.1 sitting in the Basis field is the underlying the contract is priced from, not something you can open a chart on. This broker lists only the delivery month currently trading, so at the time of that search NQ_Z — the December Nasdaq contract — was not on the board at all. That has a practical consequence and it is the one that catches people: you cannot prepare next month’s chart in advance, because next month’s symbol is not there to prepare.

The letters are the awkward part, because they are not consistent between products. Each contract has its own delivery cycle, so the letter you see next to gold is not the letter you see next to the Nasdaq at the same moment. On the day I read this terminal, five different letters were live across the board at once:

This is the E-mini Nasdaq-100 September contract as the Specification window stated it. Read the left column as the instruction and the middle column as one broker’s answer — because the left column is what transfers and the middle column is what does not.

The Specification window also states the trading sessions, and it states them in server time like everything else. On this contract they read Monday to Friday, 01:00 to 24:00, with Sunday and Saturday blank. At first glance that looks wrong — futures open on Sunday evening, and here Sunday is empty. It is not wrong. It is the same week you already know, shifted seven hours.

MetaTrader 5 was built around foreign exchange and it still speaks that language. It says “lot”, it says “spread”, it lets you type a volume with two decimals in it. Underneath, on this symbol, none of that means what it means on EURUSD. Three of the differences are already in the table above and take one line each; the fourth is the one nobody writes down.

Whole contracts, and nothing smaller. Volume rows: minimum 1, maximum 20, step 1 — so sizing here is a decision about how many, not about how much.

Commission is charged per side. Commission row: 4.00 US dollars per lot in and the same out, on top of a floating spread rather than buried inside it.

Margin does not shrink for the day session. Margin rows: initial and maintenance are the same number, so there is no intraday discount to find in this specification.

The filling modes will reject a forex robot

This is the one nobody documents, and it is worth reading twice if you run anything automated. The Filling field lists Fill or Kill and Immediate or Cancel and nothing else. There is no Return mode on this symbol.

An Expert Advisor written against a foreign exchange symbol will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, request ORDER_FILLING_RETURN — because that is what works there, so that is what every template and every tutorial hands you. Point that same robot at this contract and the order is simply rejected. The code is not broken, the symbol is not broken, and the platform will not explain the mismatch to you. Read the Filling field first and request a mode the symbol actually offers.

One account-level footnote to the same warning: this account hedges rather than nets, so if your risk logic assumes one position per symbol, it is making an assumption the account does not share.

Every futures contract has an end. The part that catches people is what the platform does about it, which is: almost nothing, and none of it loudly.

When the contract expires, the symbol goes close-only. You can still liquidate what you are holding; you cannot open anything new. And the chart does not switch itself. It keeps drawing the dead contract, in a window that looks exactly like it looked yesterday, until you change the symbol by hand.

There is a verifiable signal, and it is in the window you have already learned. In the Specification, the Trade field moves from one value to the other:

Everything above was read off the E-mini. The Micro E-mini Nasdaq-100 — MNQ — is the same index, the same four delivery months, the same last trading day and the same 0.25-point tick, at one tenth of the money: 2.00 US dollars per index point and 0.50 US dollars per tick, against 20.00 and 5.00 on NQ. A zone drawn on one is drawn on the other at the same prices. That is the whole reason the contract exists — the drawing does not change, the cost of being wrong does — and the method page works one zone through in ticks and dollars on both.

Finding it is the same search as section 04, with a different root. Open View → Symbols and search for MNQ. On this account, on 3 August, that search returned nothing: read the board in section 04 again and there is no Micro on it. That is a fact about one broker on one day, not about the platform, and it is the first thing to check if the Micro is the contract you actually want, because no subscription and no setting will add a contract the broker does not list. Brokers that route MetaTrader 5 through CQG — AMP and StoneX both publish their symbol guides — list the Micro under the root MNQ and the E-mini under the root ENQ, each followed by the month letter of section 11.

If the list leaves you unsure which one you opened, the Specification settles it the way it settles everything else on this page. A tick value of 0.50 US dollars is the Micro; 5.00 is the E-mini; the root can look like whatever the broker wants. Then read the margin rows, because margin is the broker’s number and the one reason to prefer the Micro that has nothing to do with drawing. The 57,500 in section 05 is one broker’s E-mini figure, and there is no Micro row on that terminal to print beside it, so read yours.

The E-mini and the Micro trade four delivery months a year — March, June, September, December — and the exchange names each one with a single letter. That letter is the only part of the symbol every broker agrees on. The root and the year digits are the broker’s, which is why the same September contract is NQ_U on the terminal this page was read from and something else on the next one.

If your terminal shows NAS100, US100 or USTEC and the chart opened without anyone selling you a subscription, you are on a contract-for-difference, and everything on this page changes at once. Same MetaTrader 5, same index, different instrument. Neither one is a fake; they are two products priced by two different parties, and this section exists because people search for NQ and end up on the other one without knowing which they hold. Here is the field-by-field version, from the Specification window on each.