CFTC Commitment of Traders — Institutional Positioning
The CFTC publishes this report on Friday for positions held the preceding Tuesday. Every figure on this page carries the date it was recorded. Nothing here is live.
Every figure on this page is a CFTC Commitments of Traders reading, published on Friday for positions held the preceding Tuesday. It is never current positioning.
You loaded this page at —. That is when the page was fetched, not when the positions were held — these figures change only when the CFTC publishes.
COT is not the same thing as our perp data. This page shows regulated futures positioning on CME and COMEX, reported weekly by the CFTC with a three-day lag. Our funding and open-interest pages show live positioning in XAU and XAG perpetual swaps on crypto venues. They are different instruments, different populations and different clocks — read them side by side, never added together.
CFTC positions as of — · not live
| Category | Long | Short | Net | Positioning |
|---|
Directional momentum of large speculator positions · latest point —
Net long contracts vs. open interest over time · weekly CFTC reports, latest —
The CFTC publishes the Commitment of Traders report every Friday, showing the net positioning of different market participant categories in regulated futures markets. The CFTC does not use one set of categories for every market: financial futures are broken down in the Traders in Financial Futures report, physical commodities in the Disaggregated report. The breakdown above always uses the categories of the report the selected contract comes from, and names which report that is.
Institutions using futures mainly to lay off risk rather than to express a view. In the Traders in Financial Futures report this is Dealer / Intermediary plus Asset Manager / Institutional; in the Disaggregated report it is Producer / Merchant / Processor / User plus Swap Dealers. Heavy short exposure here usually means a long position elsewhere is being hedged, not a bearish view.
Hedge funds, CTAs and large speculators trading for profit. Traders in Financial Futures calls them Leveraged Funds; the Disaggregated report calls them Managed Money. This is the row the net long, the % long and the signal badge on this page are computed from — it is tagged “signal basis” in the table. They are trend-followers, so an extreme reading can precede a reversal as easily as it confirms momentum.
Both reports end with the same two rows. Other Reportables are large traders above the CFTC reporting threshold who fit none of the categories above — not a small residual, and often a large share of the total. Nonreportable Positions are everyone below the threshold; extreme positioning there has historically been read as a contrarian signal.
Watch for extreme net long or short readings relative to historical range (sentiment extremes). Watch for divergence between the hedging side and the speculative side of whichever report you are looking at — the two sides are not comparable across reports, because they are different populations. Rising open interest with rising net longs = trend confirmation. Falling OI with rising net longs = weakening trend. Every reading is a Tuesday snapshot published the following Friday, never live.
Net long above 0 and rising, % long > 55%, positive weekly change
Mixed signals or positioning near historical median, no clear directional bias
Net long below 0 or declining, % long < 45%, negative weekly change