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.
ew readers of the Commitments of Traders report sometimes discover, a few weeks in, that "the COT report" is actually several reports. The CFTC publishes multiple variants every Friday, each slicing open interest in a different way. Which variant you look at depends on which market you care about and what kind of question you are trying to answer.
There are four main report families. They share the same release schedule and the same Tuesday snapshot, but they categorise traders differently — and those category differences are exactly what each report was designed to reveal.
Legacy — the original COT
The Legacy report is the oldest and simplest variant. It splits open interest into three broad groups: Non-Commercial, Commercial and Non-Reportable. It is published in two sub-versions — Futures-Only, which counts only futures contracts, and Combined, which adds options converted into futures-equivalent. The Legacy report covers all of the major physical commodity markets and is the format most commonly referenced in older market commentary.
Disaggregated — more detail on commodities
The Disaggregated report was introduced to give a sharper picture of physical commodity markets. Instead of the three-category split of the Legacy report, it breaks open interest into four groups: Producer/Merchant/Processor/User, Swap Dealers, Managed Money and Other Reportables. The Producer category is the real-world commercial side of the market. Swap Dealers and Managed Money separate the two types of participant that the Legacy report lumped together under "Non-Commercial".
For anyone following crude oil, natural gas, grains, metals or softs, the Disaggregated report is usually the more informative read. It is the report most commonly used in modern commodity commentary.
Traders in Financial Futures — the TFF report
The Traders in Financial Futures report applies the same disaggregation logic to financial markets — equity index futures, currencies, treasuries. Its categories are different: Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional, Leveraged Funds, and Other Reportables. Each reflects a type of participant specific to financial markets — primary dealers on one end, leveraged hedge funds on the other.
The TFF is the report to read for anything in rates, FX or stock index futures. It is where the breakdown between banks, real-money institutions and leveraged speculators becomes visible.
Supplemental — a few key commodities
The Supplemental report is a narrower variant covering a selected list of major agricultural futures contracts. It adds an extra category — Index Traders — to capture the large index-following flows that became significant in commodity markets in the 2000s. It is published alongside the other reports and tends to be referenced mostly by agricultural analysts and researchers.
Four report families, one release day, one Tuesday snapshot. Which one belongs in your Friday routine depends entirely on which markets you follow — and that is probably the most useful thing a new reader can know.
