Level 1 · Lesson 1 · ~15 min

What a futures market is, and what NQ is

Every post in our classroom talks about NQ moving so many points. Before charts, candles or zones, it helps to know what that thing is and why its price moves at all.

A market is a crowd agreeing on a price

Think of a busy auction for concert tickets. If more people want tickets right now than there are sellers, the price climbs. If sellers outnumber buyers, it drops. A financial market works the same way: the price is simply the last place a buyer and a seller agreed.

The Nasdaq-100: one number for 100 big companies

The Nasdaq-100 is a single number that rolls up the value of 100 of the largest companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, names like Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia. When those companies, as a group, are valued higher, the number rises.

Futures, and what NQ is

A futures contract is an agreement about a price for a later date. In practice, traders use futures to take a view on where something is heading right now. NQ is the short name for the E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures contract, traded on the CME exchange in Chicago. It trades almost around the clock, from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon (US Central time), with a short break each afternoon.

Points and ticks

NQ's price looks like 30,750.25. The smallest step it can take is a tick, which is 0.25 of a point. Four ticks make one point. When our posts say "18 pts away", that is the distance in points.

This course measures everything in points, never money. Points describe the market itself, and all the practice here happens in a simulator.

What makes it move

News, company earnings, interest-rate decisions and, most of all, the orders of thousands of people and programs. Nobody can know the next move for sure. What we study instead is where the crowd reacted before, because those places often matter again.

In our posts: "Close 30,712. How the lesson plan frames it: invalidation 30,730 (18 pts away), first objective 30,650 (62 pts away)."

That line is just prices and distances in points. By the end of this course, every part of it will read like plain English.

Recap

• A price is where buyers and sellers last agreed; more eager buyers push it up, more eager sellers push it down.
• NQ is a futures contract on the Nasdaq-100, a number that tracks 100 large companies.
• One tick is 0.25 points; four ticks make one point; our posts measure distance in points.