When you trade futures with a small account you have serious disadvantages working against you - not to mention newbies get eaten alive. Unless you have a solid track record of making $ in the stock market for a few years I would stay away from futures, it is like trying to learn surfing at Hawaii's pipeline on a 40' day. Your far better off concentrating on building your account up, from saving as much as you can, while maybe taking very infrequent trades of ETF's like SPY/QQQ/IWM/etc.
This is exactly why I recommended to OP using local quality ECN broker. With an ability to trade any multiples of 0.01 of a lot (0.05 in futures) his $5k bankroll virtually becomes $500k/$100k (currencies/other futures) compared to US based products.