CME · RTY · M2K
RTY futures: the E-mini Russell 2000
The E-mini Russell 2000 tracks U.S. small-cap stocks: the 2,000 smallest companies in the Russell 3000. One contract is $50 times the index, so each 0.10-point tick is worth $5.
- RTY tick value
- $5.00
- 0.10 index points
- RTY per point
- $50
- index point
- M2K tick value
- $0.50
- Micro E-mini Russell 2000
- Round trip, in R
- 0.029 R
- At a 0.8-ATR stop, screening engine
RTY contract specifications
| Specification | RTY · E-mini Russell 2000 | M2K · Micro E-mini Russell 2000 |
|---|---|---|
| Contract unit | $50 × the Russell 2000 Index | $5 × the Russell 2000 Index |
| Exchange | CME | CME |
| Tick size | 0.10 index points | 0.10 index points |
| Tick value | $5.00 | $0.50 |
| Value of a point | $50 | $5 |
| Settlement | Cash-settled | Cash-settled |
- Trading hours
- Sunday to Friday, 6:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET on CME Globex, with a daily halt from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET.
- RTY contract months
- March, June, September, December (H, M, U, Z)
- RTY last trading day
- 9:30 a.m. ET on the third Friday of the contract month. Volume moves to the next quarter about a week earlier.
Exchange rules as published, checked 22 September 2026. Holidays shorten the hours, and the exchange’s own calendar is the authority on any single date.
What a move in RTY is worth
Both RTY contracts, by points, ticks or entry and exit. For every contract at once, use the tick value calculator; to size a position, the position size calculator.
One point on RTY is one index point. Use a minus sign for a loss.
Profit or loss, one contract: $500.00
E-mini Russell 2000 (RTY), CME: $50 × the Russell 2000 Index. Before commissions and slippage.
How RTY trades
RTY keeps the Globex hours and the quarterly expiries of the other index contracts. Small companies are more domestic and more dependent on borrowing than the large ones in ES and NQ, so the Russell is often read as a gauge of U.S. growth and credit conditions, and it can diverge from the large-cap indices for weeks at a time.
Its history has a seam worth knowing about. Until 2017 the Russell 2000 future traded on ICE under the symbol TF; CME listed RTY that year. A long backtest on one continuous series is stitched across two venues, which is exactly the kind of join a leak audit exists to find. The screener's own RTY history starts in May 2023, after the move, so its results never cross that seam.
RTY or M2K?
The Micro E-mini Russell 2000 (M2K) is one tenth of RTY: $5 a point and $0.50 a tick, on the same price, hours and expiries. At current index levels it carries the smallest notional value of the four U.S. equity-index micros.
What the research record says about RTY
RTY is screened as the Dow's sister tape: each is offered as the other's gate. A round trip at the menu's 0.8-ATR stop on 30-minute bars costs 0.029 R, against 0.012 R on NQ and 0.053 R on ES.
Russell breadth, set against S&P or Nasdaq-100 breadth, is on the screening menu as a leg for any tape. It asks whether a move is broad or concentrated in large caps, a question a single breadth reading cannot answer.
Screening an idea on RTY
An idea on RTY is written in the Strategy Language on its own bars, in the regular session: time bars from one minute to a week, or bars that are not time bars. Those are point-and-figure, kagi and line break, drawn from 1-minute closes at any size; their signals come from the bars and their fills from the underlying 1-minute prices.
It can read 62 indicators (moving averages; oscillators such as RSI, Stochastic, MACD and CCI; volatility measures and bands such as ATR, Bollinger and Keltner; volume studies with VWAP; trend studies such as ADX and Supertrend; and community lines in their non-repainting versions); session levels such as the opening range and the prior day's high and low; and the clock and the calendar of scheduled releases; it enters at the market, on a stop or at a limit, and exits by its stop, its target, a trailing stop, a time limit or a condition.
Held overnight on day or week bars of the whole Globex session, a rule on RTY is a swing screen, read on RTY’s daily tape from July 2019 and graded candidate, promising, doubtful or dead rather than judged gate by gate. A position held overnight can open beyond its stop, so a loss can be larger than the stop you set.
The cost figures on this page are the menu's, at a 0.8-ATR stop on 30-minute bars: a screen written in the Strategy Language pays the same round trip for every contract it enters, and what that is in R depends on the stop you write, or on the ATR of its bars when you write none.
The menu, which the desk still offers beside the language, builds an idea on RTY from the tape's own order-flow delta or close location in range, or one of 66 external legs in 8 families, with YM (Dow) available as its paired gate.
- Market breadth 16
- Up / down volume 8
- Relative breadth 5
- Participation 2
- Volatility term structure 2
- Scheduled events 3
- Contract roll phase 3
- Technical indicators 27
Generated from the ledger, measured 28 October 2026. These describe specifications screened, not strategies traded.
From the research record
- SettledPicking the strategy with the best return-to-drawdown ratioReturn persists weakly out of sample and the drawdown ratio does not, so rank on return and correlation and let the portfolio shape the drawdown.
- SettledFiltering a signal by a state variable from the same barsRegime conditioning works when the state is exogenous and lagged; measured on the same bars it becomes arithmetic.
- SettledLetting walk-forward optimization choose your stopIt gravitates to the tightest stop whenever the objective restates the parameter, so score in dollars at constant risk instead.
RTY futures questions
- What is the tick value of RTY futures?
- One tick is 0.10 index points and is worth $5 per contract. Ten ticks make a point, so a full point is worth $50.
- How much is a 10-point move in Russell 2000 futures worth?
- $500 per RTY contract and $50 per Micro E-mini Russell 2000 (M2K) contract.
- What are the RTY futures trading hours?
- RTY trades on CME Globex from 6:00 p.m. ET on Sunday to 5:00 p.m. ET on Friday, with a one-hour halt from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET every weekday.
- When do RTY futures expire?
- RTY lists March, June, September and December contracts. Each stops trading at 9:30 a.m. ET on the third Friday of its month and settles in cash.
- What happened to the TF Russell 2000 futures?
- Until 2017 the Russell 2000 future traded on ICE under the symbol TF. The index licence moved to CME, which listed RTY that year, and RTY is now the traded contract.
- What is the difference between RTY and M2K?
- M2K is one tenth of RTY: $5 a point and $0.50 a tick, against $50 and $5. Same index, same price, same hours.
Screen an idea on RTY
Put a trading idea on RTY through seven gates written down before the run, from real per-fill costs to a drift null and a walk-forward. The verdict comes back in seconds.