COT Positioning

Who is long and who is short in futures — commercial hedgers against large speculators, published weekly by the CFTC.

Market

Speculative net position

+0 contracts

GULF COAST UNL 87 GAS M2 PL RB - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE — week of 2020-04-28 · +0 vs prior week

Large speculators are net long; commercials are net long at 484. Open interest 12,384.

Last 26 weeks

Week	Spec net	Comm net	Open interest
2020-04-28	0	484	12,384
2020-03-31	0	1,486	14,527
2020-03-24	0	1,690	12,639
2020-02-25	0	1,570	12,409
2019-12-31	0	1,680	13,634
2019-12-24	0	1,680	13,544
2019-12-17	0	1,805	12,648
2019-12-10	0	1,385	11,283
2019-12-03	0	860	10,379
2019-11-26	0	1,285	14,790
2019-11-19	0	1,585	14,389
2019-11-12	0	1,685	13,639
2019-11-05	0	1,435	11,989
2019-10-29	0	1,550	14,129
2019-10-22	0	1,590	12,037
2019-10-15	0	1,785	10,012
2019-09-24	0	1,350	9,046
2019-09-17	0	1,350	8,581
2019-09-10	0	690	7,803
2019-08-27	300	451	13,573
2019-08-20	300	101	13,156
2019-08-13	300	176	12,537
2019-08-06	300	191	12,562
2019-07-30	250	62	16,909
2019-07-23	375	134	17,271
2019-07-16	300	-16	16,646

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.