Most here know I'm not a fan of Emini ES futures for beginner reasons and I've gave specific reasons why along with specific recommendations about how to determine if Emini ES futures is the best trading instrument for whatever trade strategy that's going to be used. Yet, I notice most beginners don't want to here that. Therefore, one contract in a 10k account is adequate tuition money to learn a handful of valuable lessons. Hopefully, if the OP is one of the few to make it beyond a year of active trading the Emini ES futures in their first year as a trader of ES...he should spend the next year ensuring the rest of the trading plan is properly setup because most new traders have a trade method but no trading plan.
My advice would be to open an account at Oanda and trade eur/usd with something like 300 usd. Eur/usd is much harder in the beginning to trade, but behaves much nicer from a technical point of view in the end than SIF's. Only add money to your account when you see you are being profitable in a consistant way ... that will probably be your best chance to survive ... be warned this is much, much harder than most people could ever imagine ... the 95% is most likely the truth ... another piece of advice: get into a chatroom with other traders, not to copy, but for psychological support ... don't pay anything for it though, since you won't be copying ... you'll need a bit of luck on this one though ...