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.
very Friday at 3:30 PM Eastern Time, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission publishes the Commitments of Traders report. And every Friday afternoon, traders worldwide spend the next hour copy-pasting numbers from a government archive into the spreadsheet they actually use. We built the COT Report Spreadsheet to delete that hour from your week.
It is a Microsoft Excel workbook (.xlsm) wired with Power Query against the public CFTC archive. Open the file Friday afternoon and the latest week is already loaded — no manual download, no PDF parsing, no fragile screen-scraping. One locked tab carries the data; every other tab is yours to build whatever you want on top.
Why a spreadsheet, when you already have the website?
The COT-Reports.com site covers most of what most traders need: Simplified, Detailed, Weekly Summary, Charts. If you read the report and act on it the same day, the website is the fastest path from question to answer. The spreadsheet is for a different workflow — the trader who keeps a model running in Excel, who builds custom signals on top of the raw data, who wants offline access to the latest CFTC numbers without hitting our servers every time.
A few concrete reasons people buy the COT report excel spreadsheet download:
They run a long-standing positioning model in Excel and don't want to break the existing pipeline.
They build custom alerts (e.g. "ping me when Managed Money in Crude flips net short for the first time in 12 weeks") that need formula access.
They want a historical archive on their own machine — for reproducibility, for slow-internet sites, for clients who need the workbook handed off.
They simply prefer Excel's pivot tables, conditional formatting, and personal macros over web tools.
What's inside the COT Report Spreadsheet
The workbook ships with seven sheets, in this order:
**README** — short setup notes, version stamp, support email. Read it once, then forget about it.
**Config** — two editable cells: an optional API key, and a market dropdown. Everything else on this tab is locked.
**Markets** — a dictionary of the 48 most-tracked CFTC contracts with their codes, tickers, exchanges, and categories. Used by the lookup formulas under the hood.
**Data_Latest** — the latest CFTC week for every market in the dictionary, populated by Power Query. Refreshes automatically when you open the workbook.
**Data_History** — up to 520 weeks (~10 years) of weekly history for the market selected in Config!B2. Also auto-refreshes.
**Examples** — sample formulas (`COTLATEST`, `COTRANGE`, `COTSIMPLE`) plus a chart bound to the selected market. Buyer copies any formula from here into their own dashboards.
**Playground** — empty. Your work goes here.
The whole thing weighs about 560 KB and opens in any modern Microsoft Excel build. Power Query is the engine; if you've never touched it before, you don't have to — the queries are pre-built and refresh on open with zero clicks.
Optional: the API mode for cleaner columns
The default data source is the public CFTC SODA archive. It works for everyone, has no rate limit, and requires no account. The catch is that CFTC column names are messy — `noncomm_postions_spread_all` (with the typo) sits right next to `change_in_noncomm_spead_all` (with another typo). We map those to clean names in the workbook, but the underlying data still carries CFTC's quirks.
If you also subscribe to the COT Data API ($9.99/month, separate product), you can paste your token into Config!B1 and the workbook switches to our normalized API. You get cleaner columns, longer history (up to 520 weeks consistently), and the same data structure across all four CFTC report families. It's entirely optional — most buyers never set the API key and the workbook works fine.
A real workflow example
Say you trade WTI crude oil and you watch Managed Money positioning every Friday. Your weekly ritual with the COT report spreadsheet:
1. Open `cot-data-spreadsheet-v1.xlsm`. Power Query refreshes the data tab in about five seconds against the latest CFTC release.
2. Switch the dropdown in Config!B2 to "WTI CRUDE OIL". Data_History reloads with 520 weeks of history for that market.
3. Glance at the chart on the Examples tab — it auto-relabels to "Net positioning history — WTI CRUDE OIL" and shows non-commercial long vs short over the past decade.
4. Open your own analysis tab in the workbook. Use `=COTLATEST("067651","noncomm_long")` to pull the current Managed Money long position. Compare it to last week, last month, and last year using `=COTSIMPLE("067651", -52, "noncomm_long")` for the year-ago number.
5. Drop the result into your weekly trade plan, save, close. Total time: under 90 seconds for the data side, however long you spend on analysis itself.
No copy-paste from the CFTC website. No CSV downloads to manage. The data is in the spreadsheet you were going to use anyway.
What it costs and what you actually buy
The COT report spreadsheet is a $39 one-time purchase. After Stripe checkout you get an instant download link to the .xlsm plus a 30-day re-download window through your account in case you switch machines or lose the file.
Two things to be honest about:
First, the workbook is sold separately from the upcoming Google Sheets version. Most traders only ever open one or the other — pick the spreadsheet you actually use. Existing Excel buyers will get a discount code for the Sheets template when it ships.
Second, the workbook is not a trading signal tool. It's the raw CFTC data, structured cleanly, refreshed automatically. The interpretation is still yours to do — and if that's the part you want help with, the free articles on this blog (and the upcoming "How to Read the COT Reports" guide) are a better starting point than the workbook itself.
Beyond the workbook: the COT Data Dump
The COT report spreadsheet is built for the weekly user — open the file, see the latest week, get on with the day. If your need is bigger than that — building a quant model, training a machine learning system, doing a multi-decade backtest — there is a separate product designed for the bulk download case: the COT Data Dump.
The Data Dump is a $49 one-time purchase that ships every CFTC market, every report family (Legacy, Disaggregated, TFF, Supplemental), from 1986 to today, in both CSV and NDJSON. The whole archive is in a single ZIP, schema-versioned, with a SHA-256 manifest so you can verify integrity. It's the same dataset that powers our website and the spreadsheet — just packaged as a static archive instead of a refreshable workbook.
Two products, two workflows. Use the spreadsheet if you want a tool that lives in Excel and updates itself every Friday. Use the Data Dump if you want the entire archive on your machine for offline analysis, backtesting, or piping into a database. They're complementary — buyers who need both pay $88 total — but most readers only ever need one.
The underlying data in both cases is U.S. federal public domain (17 USC §105). What you're paying for is the curation, the packaging, the maintenance against CFTC's schema changes, and the fact that the file works the moment you open it. We exist so you don't have to build any of this yourself.
