COT Data in MetaTrader and NinjaTrader: What Each Offers

NinjaTrader 8: a built-in COT indicator

NinjaTrader’s Help Guide describes a COT indicator that plots weekly data from the Commitment Of Traders report, showing the holdings of different participants in the U.S. futures market. It works in three steps:

• Turn on the data. In the Control Center, go to Tools › Options › Market Data, check “Download COT data at start up” and restart NinjaTrader. Without it, the indicator shows a message on the chart instead of plots.
• Choose what to plot. One instance of the indicator shows one to five plots, for many U.S. futures instruments. For each plot you choose a Report and a Field from that report. The guide suggests putting open interest on its own panel, because its value is usually much larger than the net positions.
• Refresh after a release. The latest value keeps plotting forward until new data is available; after the CFTC releases a new report, NinjaTrader has to be restarted to download it.

The guide also notes that, because the report is historical weekly data that does not change with price or volume, there is no benefit in having the indicator calculate on every price change or every tick.

COT data in NinjaScript

For programmers, the NinjaScript reference documents a COT() method that gives a custom script the same data, with up to five plots. Each plot can be given its own report type (the reference’s example uses the Combined report) and its own field, and the field list includes Disaggregated groups such as Producer/Merchant/Processor/User. According to the reference, when a field is not supported by the chosen report type, open interest is returned instead, and since the data is weekly it is meant to be calculated on bar close.

Whichever way it is read, it helps to note which report family and which version a plot shows, Futures Only or Futures & Options Combined, before comparing it with another source.

MetaTrader 4 and 5: COT indicators from the MQL5 Market and Code Base

The MetaTrader 5 Help lists 38 built-in technical indicators, grouped as trend indicators, oscillators, volume indicators and Bill Williams’ indicators; that page does not mention COT data. Additional indicators come from two places the help describes: the Code Base, a library of free applications published as source code, and the Market, a store where programs are purchased or rented.

COT tools exist in both. As an illustration of the two kinds, we read one listing of each (both are in the sources; we endorse neither of them):

• A Market indicator for MetaTrader 5 computes a COT Index from the report’s net positions, with a setting to read the Futures Only or the Futures and Options report and lookbacks of 25, 52 or 156 weeks. Its page states that the CFTC reports have to be downloaded and installed on the computer by a separate utility, and that access to cftc.gov is blocked in some countries.
• A Code Base indicator set for MetaTrader 4 is published as source code and covers the Legacy, Disaggregated, TFF and Commodity Index Trader reports, but its page states that it needs additional libraries to work, and that the free version delivers the data with a delay.

Questions to ask before installing a COT indicator

Because MetaTrader’s COT tools come from independent developers, they differ in ways that matter for the numbers they show. The questions below apply to any of them, and to NinjaTrader’s own indicator too:

• Which report and which version? Legacy, Disaggregated, TFF or Supplemental; Futures Only or Futures & Options Combined.
• Where does the data come from? Downloaded from cftc.gov to the computer, or delivered by the developer’s own server.
• How does it update after a release? Automatically, after a restart, or after a manual download.
• How far back does it go, and which market does it match to the chart’s symbol?
• Who maintains it, and when was it last updated? The CFTC has announced a twice-weekly schedule (see below); whether a given tool handles two reports a week is a question for its developer.

Weekly data on an intraday chart

Both platforms draw price bar by bar, while COT data arrives on the CFTC’s schedule: one report a week when this article was written, with positions measured a few days before the release. On a one-hour or one-minute chart, a COT plot therefore stays flat for days and steps once per report. The last value shows the positions on the measurement day, not today.

The schedule is changing: on 27 October 2026 the CFTC announced that it will publish the report twice a week by the end of 2026, with a shorter lag. Our release schedule page shows the dates in force.

Using COT-Reports.com data alongside a platform

COT-Reports.com presents the same CFTC data on pages made only for it, for every one of the 350+ CFTC markets we cover:

• Tables and charts, free: the COT Report Simplified and Detailed tables, the COT Data Charts (net positions against price and open interest, the whole history, without an account) and the COT Index. A free account opens up to 10 years of history on the report tables.
• CSV export, with COT Premium: any report table can be exported as a CSV file.
• A free sample CSV: any free account can download one market (the Australian Dollar, Legacy Futures Only, the newest 52 reports) from the Data Dump page, in the same format as the full history, to test an import before anything else.
• The full history: the Data Dump, a one-time download of the whole COT history.
• The COT Data API: the same data as JSON over REST, by subscription. Its reference is on the API docs page, and a demo endpoint that needs no key returns a sample response for testing a parser.

A developer writing a NinjaScript or MQL indicator can read either the CSV files or the API’s JSON; how a platform loads external data is described in its own documentation. This article describes tools and data; it is not trading advice.