For those who are new to futures or want to start to trade futures , you can avoid the large capital losses which will occur in your learning curve by starting out trading the CME mini and micro futures. Not a lot of newbie traders are trading these products do to the fact they cannot back test strategies on them. The problem of back testing these products is; 1) none of them have a continuous contract of historical data to back test on, just a few months of data available until the contracts roll into another symbol 2) the volume is thin so there are enough price gaps to destroy any successful strategy from the corresponding full sized future continuous future back test. The good news is that the trading technology has evolved so that trading signals from the successful strategies running on the full sized continuous contracts can be sent to make fully automated trades on the minis and micros or any other product you may want to trade. Signals trade signals sent from a 120 minute or from a .002 range bar chart can be received in real time on a 1 minute mini/micro chart like shown in the charts below.
Mini and Micros have issues of liquidity on many contracts. Your size maybe smaller, but risk of higher slippage and inability to get filled is higher.