Notional on 1 MES is equal to 50 SPY. If you can change the recommendation from 10 SPY to 50 SPY, he can get started with a futures account. I personally think $5k account is sufficient to trade 1 MES. That's like asking someone to start with a $50k account and trade 1 ES only. No one really does that, do they? Incidentally, there's a smaller SPY these days
And now we're 40 points down again. If it's the same pattern as yesterday where we in fact first traded 90 points off the morning lows, we can easily make new lows again.