COT Data on TradingView vs COT-Reports.com: How to Read Both

Where COT data comes from

The Commitments of Traders report is published by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It breaks down the open interest of U.S. futures markets by type of trader: who holds long positions, who holds short ones, and how that changes from one report to the next. TradingView’s Help Center describes the data the same way: it is tallied by the CFTC and gives traders information about open interest for an asset.

The CFTC publishes several report families: Legacy, Disaggregated, Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) and Supplemental. Legacy, Disaggregated and TFF each come in two versions, Futures Only and Futures & Options Combined. Any tool that shows COT data reads one of these, so the first thing to check on a COT chart is which family and which version it shows.

How to find COT data on TradingView

TradingView’s pages describe two ways in:

• The built-in indicators. The Help Center lists four indicators published from the official TradingView account: Commitment of Traders: Total, Commitment of Traders: Legacy Metrics, Commitment of Traders: Disaggregated Metrics and Commitment of Traders: Financial Metrics. Each one is loaded on an open chart.
• The symbol search. TradingView’s blog post of January 2022 explains that typing the prefix COT:, COT2: or COT3: in the search bar gives access to the Legacy, Disaggregated and Traders in Financial Futures data respectively.

According to the Help Center, COT data is available for assets traded on CBOT, CME, NYMEX, COMEX and ICEUS. For Pine Script programmers, TradingView also publishes a library, LibraryCOT, that reads the same data from a script. Its documentation builds each COT ticker from the report type, the CFTC code of the market and a flag: “F” when the data excludes options, “FO” when it includes them.

For anything not covered here, such as plans or how far back each series goes, TradingView’s own Help Center is the reference; its features and menus can change after the date of this article.

How to read COT data on a TradingView chart

According to its own page, the Commitment of Traders: Legacy Metrics indicator uses the chart’s symbol by default to pick the COT data it shows; a CFTC code can be entered instead, and when no COT data can be found, the script shows an error.

Two settings decide which numbers appear. The metric picks what is drawn: open interest, the positions of a trader group, the number of traders and others. The Futures/Options setting, in the page’s words, chooses data concerning only futures, only options, or both. That is the Futures Only vs Futures & Options Combined question: the same market can show different numbers depending on whether options are included, so it helps to note which one a chart reads before comparing it with another source.

Beyond the settings, COT data reads the same in any tool:

• Net position = the longs minus the shorts of one trader group. Its level and its change over time are what most readers look at.
• The trader groups depend on the report. Legacy splits reportable positions into commercial and non-commercial; Disaggregated into Producer/Merchant/Processor/User, Swap Dealers, Managed Money and Other Reportables; TFF into Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional, Leveraged Funds and Other Reportables. These are the same classifications TradingView’s Help Center lists.
• Each data point has two dates: the day the positions were measured and the day the CFTC released them, a few days later. The last value on a chart describes the positions as of the measurement date, not today.

What COT-Reports.com shows

COT-Reports.com is built from the CFTC’s own files and does one thing: it presents COT data. Every one of the 350+ CFTC markets we cover is visible on every report page, to everyone. The main pages:

• COT Report Simplified: the net positioning of each market as a colour-coded history of reports, so changes stand out without any calculation.
• COT Report Detailed: open interest broken down by trader category, market by market.
• COT Data Charts: the net positions of the trader groups drawn against price and open interest, for every market, over its whole history, without an account.
• COT Index: where a group’s net position stands within its own range, from 0 to 100, for every market; the shorter lookbacks are open to everyone, the longer ones need a free account.
• CFTC Release Schedule: the dates of the coming releases and a countdown to the next one.

How much history is free: without an account, the report tables show up to the last 6 months; a free account opens every period up to 10 years; the Charts page draws the whole history for everyone. The site holds the Legacy report since 1986 and the Disaggregated, TFF and Supplemental reports since 2006.

COT Premium adds the Disaggregated, TFF and Supplemental report pages, the Futures & Options Combined version through the variant switch (Futures Only, the default of the Legacy pages, is free), a custom date range and CSV export.

TradingView and COT-Reports.com side by side

The two are built for different jobs. What each offers, from TradingView’s pages and from our own site:

• Where the data sits: on TradingView, in indicators and symbols on a price chart; on COT-Reports.com, on pages made only for COT data.
• Report families: TradingView’s pages name Legacy, Disaggregated and Financial (TFF); COT-Reports.com has those three plus the Supplemental report.
• Futures Only or Combined: both can show either version; on TradingView through the Futures/Options setting of the Legacy Metrics indicator or the library’s F/FO flag, on COT-Reports.com through the variant switch (Futures & Options Combined with COT Premium).
• Picking a market: on TradingView, the indicator follows the symbol of the open chart unless a CFTC code is entered; on COT-Reports.com, any market is picked from the market list.
• More than one market: COT-Reports.com also has a comparison page that lines up two markets side by side.

Many traders use both: COT data on TradingView next to the price, and the tables, the long history and the release dates on COT-Reports.com. Neither one changes the underlying numbers, which come from the CFTC in both cases. This article describes tools and data; it is not trading advice.