FROM THE EDITORS · ENGLISH
Long-form thinking about positioning data.
We do not publish news. We publish the kind of patient, structural notes you wish you had on a Sunday evening before next week’s open. New essays roughly every two weeks.
The COT-Reports blog publishes weekly market commentary built on CFTC Commitments of Traders data — managed money positioning shifts, hedge-fund extremes, smart-money rotations and macro themes derived directly from the latest weekly release, written for active futures and forex traders.
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More from the editors.
The COT Report Spreadsheet — pulling weekly CFTC data straight into Excel
A proper Excel template (.xlsm) that auto-refreshes the latest COT report on open. No copy-pasting from CFTC, no API key required. Plus a note on the Data Dump for traders who need the entire historical archive at once.
The COT Data API — programmatic access to weekly CFTC reports
A REST API for the Commitments of Traders dataset. Bearer auth, JSON responses, four endpoints, $9.99/month. For traders who code, analysts who pipe data into dashboards, and anyone who needs the COT report inside something other than a browser or a spreadsheet.
Twenty Quietly Useful Facts About the COT Report
Most readers know the basics of the Commitments of Traders report. Beyond that, the picture thins out fast. A short tour of twenty quieter facts, gathered into five sections.
What COT-Reports.com Offers for Free
A short tour of everything you can get on COT-Reports.com without paying a cent — the Telegram channel, the bot, the weekly tables, the charts and the comparison view. Plus a brief note on what lives behind the paid tier.
COT and Open Interest: Two Datasets Behind Every Futures Market
Open interest and the Commitments of Traders report are the two public datasets that shape how futures markets are described. A short note on how they complement each other.
The Friday Release and the Three-Day Lag
Every Friday afternoon the CFTC publishes the latest Commitments of Traders file. The data inside it is three days old. A short note on why that is — and why it matters less than it looks.
Trader Categories Across the COT Reports
The Legacy, Disaggregated and Traders in Financial Futures reports each use their own labels for market participants. A short note on what each label means and why the CFTC bothered with three different systems.
Who Actually Trades Futures
The COT report splits every market into trader categories. A short look at who those participants really are — and why the mix is different from what most people imagine.
The Report Families the CFTC Publishes
The Commitments of Traders report is not one report — it is a family of them. A short overview of the Legacy, Disaggregated, Traders in Financial Futures and Supplemental variants, and who each one is designed for.
Non-Commercial Positioning and Market Sentiment
Hedge funds, CTAs and large speculators leave a weekly fingerprint in the COT data. A short note on what that fingerprint has historically meant for market sentiment.
Why the COT Report Still Matters
Decades after it first appeared, the Commitments of Traders report is still one of the most-watched public datasets in the futures world. A short note on why.
From Spreadsheet to Web: The COT Reports Tradition
For decades, serious futures traders kept their own COT reports spreadsheet — a weekly ritual of downloading CFTC files and pasting them into Excel. A short note on where that ritual came from and where it is going.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often is the blog updated?
We publish at least one positioning analysis post per week, usually within 24 hours of the Friday CFTC release. Additional posts cover educational topics, market-regime analyses and broker / prop firm reviews on an ad-hoc schedule.
Who writes the blog?
Posts are written by Valentin Dima, the founder of COT-Reports.com. We cite CFTC data and source files explicitly so any claim can be independently verified. We do not republish third-party blog content under our byline.
Can I subscribe to new posts?
Yes — subscribe to the COT-Reports newsletter on any newsletter card across the site, or follow our Telegram channel for instant notifications when new posts go live.
What topics does the COT-Reports blog cover?
Weekly positioning recaps for major futures and forex markets, market-regime analyses tied to CFTC data, broker and prop firm reviews, educational deep-dives on each CFTC report family, and occasional macro pieces tying COT positioning to bond yields, dollar moves, and commodity cycles. Every post links back to the underlying data on cot-reports.com so any claim is reproducible.
Are blog posts free to read?
Yes — every post is fully free, no signup, no paywall. The blog is the public side of cot-reports.com; Premium subscriptions unlock the data pages and the report formats, not the blog content.
Where do you source data and citations?
CFTC SODA Open Data API for Commitments of Traders data (U.S. federal public domain, 17 USC §105), Yahoo Finance and the exchange websites for price + volume context, Bank of International Settlements for FX positioning context, and the prop firm / broker websites for their own disclosed offerings. Posts cite sources inline.
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