To read the Commitment of Traders report, open the CFTC’s weekly file for the market you care about, pick the format that matches that market, and work through three things in order: how many contracts each category of trader holds long and short, how those positions changed from the previous week, and where the current net position sits relative to its own multi-year range. Everything else in the report supports those three reads.
When the Report Comes Out and Where to Get It
The CFTC publishes the report every Friday afternoon Eastern Time, with data as of the close of business the previous Tuesday.1Commodity Futures Trading Commission. COT Release Schedule That three-day lag is deliberate: the agency verifies the numbers before release. When a federal holiday lands on Friday, the release usually slides to the next business day.
Files live on the CFTC’s Commitments of Traders page in both text and Excel formats, organized by report type and exchange.2Commitments of Traders | CFTC. Commitments of Traders Reports Descriptions Gold sits under COMEX. Treasury futures sit under the Chicago Board of Trade. Each file contains dozens of individual contracts, with columns breaking down positions by trader type.
The Columns You Have to Know
Every format uses the same core column vocabulary. If these aren’t clear, none of the downstream analysis works.
- Open Interest. The total number of futures or options contracts still active — not closed, expired, or delivered. High open interest means a liquid market with many committed participants. Declining open interest means traders are leaving.
- Long positions. Contracts that profit when prices rise. If a trader category shows 150,000 longs, that group collectively holds 150,000 contracts betting on higher prices.
- Short positions. Contracts that profit when prices fall. The mirror of longs.
- Spreading. Positions where a trader holds both longs and shorts in the same or related markets, usually to profit from the price difference between delivery months rather than from outright direction.
- Changes from previous report. Week-over-week changes in each category. This is where the real signal lives, because the direction of flow matters more than any static snapshot.
Who the Traders Are
Every COT report sorts market participants by why they trade. Confusing the categories means misreading the report, because a farmer selling futures has completely different motivations than a hedge fund doing the same thing.
Commercials (Hedgers)
Commercial traders use futures to protect a real business interest in the physical commodity: a wheat farmer selling futures to lock in a harvest price, an airline buying jet fuel contracts to cap costs, a refinery hedging crude purchases. They qualify for this classification by filing a Form 40 with the CFTC, which details their business and their hedging.3eCFR. 17 Code Federal Regulations Appendix A to Part 18 – Form 40 Because they’re hedging physical exposure, commercials tend to sell when prices are high and buy when prices are low. That behavior is why their positioning often acts as a contrarian signal.
Non-Commercials (Large Speculators)
Non-commercials have no physical need for the commodity. Hedge funds, commodity trading advisors, and institutional money managers show up here, trading purely for financial returns. Their positions must meet or exceed the CFTC’s reporting thresholds for the specific market, which is why they’re called “large” speculators. Because these traders manage significant capital and often follow momentum, their collective shifts frequently signal sentiment changes before prices move.
Non-Reportable Positions (Small Traders)
Everyone below the CFTC’s reporting thresholds gets aggregated into non-reportable positions. The CFTC calculates the figure by subtracting all reported positions from total open interest. Individually, these traders don’t move markets. In aggregate, they reveal what the retail crowd is doing, and experienced readers watch for moments when small traders lean heavily one way while commercials lean the other.
Which Format to Open
The CFTC publishes four report formats. Opening the wrong one for your market means the categories won’t line up with what actually drives the price.
Legacy Report
The oldest and simplest format, available back to 1986.2Commitments of Traders | CFTC. Commitments of Traders Reports Descriptions Open interest splits into three categories: commercial, non-commercial, and non-reportable.4Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Commitments of Traders Its strength is depth of history, which makes it useful for comparing current positioning against decades of prior data. Its weakness is that swap dealers and corn farmers both land in “commercial” even though their motivations differ.
Disaggregated Report
Available since 2006, this format breaks the legacy categories into four more specific groups: Producer/Merchant, Swap Dealers, Managed Money, and Other Reportables.5Commodity Futures Trading Commission – Public Reporting. COT Disaggregated Combined The split matters because swap dealers often hold futures to offset over-the-counter derivatives they’ve sold to clients, which has nothing to do with physical supply and demand. Managed Money captures the fund managers most people mean when they say “speculators.” For physical commodities like energy, metals, or agriculture, this is usually the clearest read.
Traders in Financial Futures (TFF)
Built for financial contracts: currencies, Treasury bonds, equity index futures, and interest rate products. Its four categories are Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional, Leveraged Funds, and Other Reportables.6Office of Financial Research. CFTC Traders in Financial Futures Separating Asset Managers (pension funds, insurance companies, endowments) from Leveraged Funds (hedge funds, CTAs) is useful because those groups often trade in opposite directions with different time horizons.
Commodity Index Trader (CIT) Supplement
A supplemental report that pulls index fund positions out of the legacy commercial bucket for select agricultural markets. Index funds passively track broad commodity benchmarks, stay net long, and roll contracts on a schedule regardless of price. Lumping them in with active hedgers distorts the picture, so the CFTC breaks them out.2Commitments of Traders | CFTC. Commitments of Traders Reports Descriptions CIT data has been available since January 2006.
Calculating Net Position
The single most useful number in any COT report is the net position for a trader category. Take long contracts and subtract short contracts. If non-commercials hold 150,000 longs and 60,000 shorts, they’re net long 90,000 contracts. A positive number means that group is collectively bullish; a negative number means it’s collectively bearish.
The raw number matters less than how it changes. If speculators were net long 120,000 contracts last week and 90,000 this week, they’re reducing their bullish bets even though the position is still positive. That kind of unwinding often precedes or coincides with a price decline. A net position that grows steadily over several weeks suggests conviction, not a short-term pop.
Do this calculation for each trader category separately. Commercial net positioning and speculator net positioning frequently move in opposite directions, and that divergence is where the most actionable signals appear.
The COT Index: Turning Net Positions Into a Percentile
Raw net numbers are hard to compare over time because markets grow. A net long of 50,000 contracts might be extreme in one year and ordinary three years later after open interest has doubled. The COT Index solves this by converting the current net position into a percentile of its historical range.
The formula: take the current week’s net position, subtract the lowest net position over your lookback window, then divide by the difference between the highest and lowest net positions over that same window. Multiply by 100. A reading near 0% means the group is close to its most bearish positioning in the lookback period; a reading near 100% means it’s near its most bullish.
Most analysts use a lookback of roughly three years (about 156 weeks), adjustable for the market and your timeframe. Readings below 20% or above 80% are generally considered extreme. When the speculator COT Index sits above 90% and the commercial COT Index below 10%, that’s the kind of setup that has often preceded trend reversals, though extremes can persist for weeks before the market turns.
Using Open Interest to Confirm the Trend
Net positioning tells you which direction traders are leaning. Open interest tells you whether the trend has fuel behind it. Together they give a more reliable read than either alone.
Rising prices with rising open interest means new money is entering on the long side. That’s the strongest confirmation of a bullish trend. Rising prices with falling open interest usually means short-sellers are buying back positions to exit, not fresh demand arriving. Short-covering rallies tend to be sharp but short-lived.
The reverse works the same way. Falling prices with rising open interest means aggressive new short-selling, which supports a bearish trend. Falling prices with falling open interest means longs are liquidating, which often signals the selling is running out of steam. Price direction crossed with open interest direction is one of the most practical frameworks the COT data offers.
Reading Commercials as a Contrarian Signal
Commercial traders are the closest thing to informed money in physical commodity markets. They know their industry’s supply and demand firsthand and hedge accordingly. When a corn producer sells an unusually large number of futures contracts, that producer is signaling current prices look attractive enough to lock in. When commercials swing aggressively net long, they’re seeing bargain prices relative to their physical market view.
That creates a natural contrarian dynamic with speculators. At major tops, speculators often sit at extreme net long positions while commercials are heavily net short. At major bottoms, speculators are piled into shorts while commercials load up on longs. The COT data lets you quantify this divergence rather than guess at it.
A practical read: when the commercial COT Index drops below 10% while the speculator COT Index sits above 90%, conditions are ripe for a correction. It’s not a timing tool. It won’t tell you the day the market turns. It identifies the conditions under which reversals have historically occurred. One structural reason those extremes tend to reverse is that speculators bump up against federal position limits, which cap how many contracts a single non-hedging trader can hold in 25 core referenced futures contracts, with spot-month limits generally set at or below 25% of estimated deliverable supply.7eCFR. 17 CFR 150.3 – Exemptions Commercial hedgers can exceed those limits by applying for a bona fide hedging exemption, which is why commercial positions in the same market can dwarf speculator positions.
Mistakes That Trip Up New Readers
The biggest error is treating the COT report as a short-term trading trigger. The data is three days old by the time you see it, and Tuesday’s positions may have shifted by Friday afternoon. The report works best as a backdrop, describing who is positioned where over weeks and months, not as a signal for Monday morning trades.
Another frequent mistake is ignoring the spreading column. Looking only at total longs and total shorts for non-commercials overstates their directional conviction. A trader long 50,000 contracts and short 40,000 in related delivery months isn’t bearish by 40,000. Those spread positions largely offset. The net position after removing spreads is the real directional bet.
Don’t compare net positions across different commodities without adjusting for contract size and total market open interest. A net long of 100,000 contracts in E-mini S&P 500 futures is not the same as 100,000 contracts in oats. The COT Index handles this automatically by normalizing against each market’s own history, which is another reason to use it rather than rely on raw contract counts.
One boundary worth keeping in mind: the CFTC aggregates positions across accounts under common ownership or control, including cases where one person holds a 10% or greater interest.8eCFR. 17 CFR 150.4 – Aggregation of Positions That aggregation shapes the classifications you see in the report, but the report itself does not break positions out by individual entity. It’s a category-level view, not a name-level view.