COT Positioning
Who is long and who is short in futures — commercial hedgers against large speculators, published weekly by the CFTC.
-656 contracts
CBT ETHANOL - CHICAGO BOARD OF TRADE — week of 2019-05-21 · +71 vs prior week
Large speculators are net short; commercials are net long at 726. Open interest 1,588.
| Week | Spec net | Comm net | Open interest |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-05-21 | -656 | 726 | 1,588 |
| 2019-05-14 | -727 | 853 | 1,784 |
| 2019-05-07 | -532 | 658 | 1,568 |
| 2019-04-30 | -441 | 482 | 1,485 |
| 2019-04-09 | 78 | -101 | 1,401 |
| 2019-04-02 | 180 | -298 | 1,361 |
| 2019-03-26 | 251 | -426 | 1,388 |
| 2019-03-12 | -545 | 520 | 1,598 |
| 2019-03-05 | -172 | 198 | 1,439 |
| 2019-02-26 | -416 | 426 | 1,690 |
| 2019-02-19 | -580 | 545 | 2,167 |
| 2019-02-05 | -680 | 758 | 2,183 |
| 2019-01-29 | -973 | 1,030 | 2,358 |
| 2019-01-22 | -778 | 926 | 2,382 |
| 2019-01-15 | -731 | 927 | 2,467 |
| 2019-01-08 | -652 | 807 | 2,433 |
| 2018-12-31 | -741 | 938 | 2,817 |
| 2018-12-24 | -660 | 786 | 2,886 |
| 2018-12-18 | -595 | 697 | 2,792 |
| 2018-12-11 | -540 | 573 | 2,915 |
| 2018-12-04 | -613 | 637 | 2,569 |
| 2018-11-27 | -768 | 724 | 2,625 |
| 2018-11-20 | -923 | 936 | 2,673 |
| 2018-11-13 | -969 | 991 | 2,598 |
| 2018-11-06 | -793 | 870 | 2,287 |
| 2018-10-30 | -965 | 1,075 | 2,585 |
How to read a COT report
Every Friday the CFTC publishes how open interest in each futures market was divided the previous Tuesday, split into three groups:
- Commercials — businesses hedging real exposure. An airline buying crude, a miller selling wheat. They are usually on the opposite side of price moves because they are hedging, not speculating.
- Non-commercials — large speculators, mostly managed money. This is the group whose net position gets quoted as "the COT number."
- Non-reportables — everyone too small to report.
The number people watch is speculative net — long minus short. Extremes matter more than levels: when speculators are as long as they have been in years, the marginal buyer is largely used up.
Timing, which trips people up
The report is dated Tuesday and released Friday afternoon. It is already three days stale when you read it, and it says nothing about intraweek moves. Treat it as a positioning survey, not a signal you can act on the same day.
Where this comes from
Straight from the CFTC's published archive at cftc.gov — the legacy Commitments of Traders format, which has the longest continuous history and the commercial/non-commercial split traders actually use. It is a work of the US government, free to use. This site holds 212,198 weekly rows across 764 markets since 2010.