Commitments of Traders: What the Weekly CFTC Count Is, and What It Is Not

Commitments of Traders, or COT, is the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission's weekly count of who holds long and short futures positions in each market it covers. The commission is the CFTC, the regulator of US futures. Positions are counted at the close on Tuesday and the report is published on Friday.

What does Commitments of Traders count?

The report counts open positions, not trades. For each futures market, it states how many contracts are long and how many are short, and it splits them by who holds them. The split is the point of the report: it tells you whether the large speculators, the hedgers or the small traders hold a given side.

For forex it covers the currency futures traded in the US and gold. Our COT Report page follows the seven dollar majors and gold, which makes eight markets, with the yen, franc and Canadian dollar turned round so that each reads in the pair's terms. A futures contract is not the pair on your broker's screen, so every reading carries that gap.

Who is in the Commitments of Traders report?

Three groups, in the legacy version. Non-commercial traders are the large speculators. Commercial traders use the futures to hedge a business they already have. Nonreportable traders are what is left once every position above the reporting level is taken away. The CFTC's explanatory notes define each. Our word for the large speculators is the crowd, and the non-commercial positions page says more about them.

The groups always balance. Every long position has a short on the other side, so across the three groups the net positions add up to zero. A crowd is therefore never the whole market.

When does the Commitments of Traders report come out?

On Friday at 15:30 New York time, with the positions of the Tuesday before. That makes a normal report three days old when you read it. A federal holiday can push a release to the Monday, and then the data is six days old. The COT release schedule word has the rule, and the release date page lists the dates.

What does Commitments of Traders leave out?

Quite a lot, and it helps to know the gaps before relying on any reading.

• Spot forex. The report is futures only, so it is a sample of a much wider market.
• Time. It has no timestamp inside the week and no price. It cannot say when a position was opened.
• Intent. A short may be a bet or a hedge. No column says which.
• Names. The four largest traders in a market are not named.

That is why a COT reading is a description of who holds what and not a forecast. Our index turns the count into a place in a range, see COT index, and a crowded reading can last for months. Fade the Crowd is how we read the extremes.

Why do traders read it?

Because it is one of the few places where a regulator publishes who is on which side. Most trading data shows price and volume. This shows positions, grouped by who holds them, and a trader can set a group's position against its own past to see whether it is unusually stretched. That is what the COT index does. It does not make the count a forecast, and our tests show how little a crowded reading proves, which the COT report hub states with the figures.

Where do you read it?

The CFTC publishes the report on its COT page and in a public feed. To go through one real row, column by column, read how to read the COT report. For the whole subject, start at the COT report hub, and for the plain explanation, what the COT report is in forex.

Where is Commitments of Traders taught?

Course 1 of ForexiaPRO, Reading the Map, teaches the report in lesson 1.3.1, in its module on the crowd. The module goes on to the index, the lean and the trade, and reading a real week.