COT reports: where funds, hedgers and small traders stand in 23 markets
A new /cot section reads the weekly Commitments of Traders report: how traders are positioned in futures on currencies, bitcoin and ether, metals, oil, gas and stock indices.
What the report shows
Every week the US regulator CFTC publishes how open futures positions are split between three groups of traders. Large speculators are funds and trading advisers who hold futures for the price move. Commercial hedgers are producers, consumers and banks that use futures to fix a price for business they already have. Small traders are everyone below the reporting threshold.
The /cot hub puts it into one table by sector: the net position of speculators and hedgers, the change since the previous week and the share of longs.
A page for each market
Each of the 23 markets has a page of its own, with:
- Net positions — the three groups on a weekly chart over three years.
- The latest report — its full split of longs, shorts and spreading positions.
- The three-year range — where the speculators' net position sits between its three-year low and high, from 0 to 100. Readings near either end mark crowded positioning; they say nothing about when it turns.
- Recent reports — a table of the last eight weeks.
The markets: the euro, yen, pound, Swiss franc, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dollars, the Mexican peso and the dollar index; bitcoin and ether; gold, silver, copper and platinum; crude oil and natural gas; the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, Dow Jones, Russell 2000 and VIX; and the 10-year US Treasury note.
Bitcoin and ether
CME lists regulated bitcoin and ether futures, and the CFTC reports them like any other market. Funds that cannot hold coins directly trade these contracts, so the report shows how that money is positioned in crypto — something spot exchanges do not disclose. On the hub, bitcoin has a card of its own.
What to keep in mind
The data is three days old by design: the CFTC counts positions as of Tuesday and publishes them on Friday at 3:30 pm New York time. Past weeks are sometimes revised, so every six hours we reread the last four weeks and revised figures replace the old ones.
This is the legacy report, futures only — the version with the longest history and the three classic groups. Versions that add options or split traders into finer groups will show different numbers for that reason alone.
