How Traders Use the COT Report: What They Read, Its Limits

What the COT report contains

The CFTC publishes the futures and options positions of traders that hold positions above specific reporting levels, market by market, broken down into groups of traders. According to the CFTC’s Explanatory Notes, these reportable positions usually make up 70 to 90 percent of a market’s open interest; the rest is grouped as non-reportable.

There are four report families: Legacy, Disaggregated, Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) and Supplemental. Legacy, Disaggregated and TFF each come in a Futures Only and a Futures & Options Combined version. Every view below can be read from any of them, as long as the family and the version stay the same when two numbers are compared.

Net positioning by trader group

The starting point for most readers is the net position of each group: its long contracts minus its short contracts. A positive number means the group holds more longs than shorts, a negative one the reverse. Readers look at which side each group is on and how large that position is, often next to the market’s open interest.

In the Legacy report the comparison most people make is between commercials and non-commercials. Commercials are traders that the CFTC classifies as using futures for hedging, as its rules define it, typically producers, merchants and users of a commodity who offset an exposure in the physical market. Non-commercials are the other large reportable traders, such as funds. The two groups often sit on opposite sides of a market, and many readers follow how far apart they are.

Two cautions from the CFTC itself apply here. One trading entity can be a commercial in one commodity and a non-commercial in another, and CFTC staff may re-classify a trader when they have additional information. The groups are categories of the report, not fixed labels of who is behind them.

Change from one report to the next

The second view is the change: how much each group’s longs, shorts and net position moved since the previous report. One change on its own says little; readers usually look at several consecutive changes to see whether a group has been adding to one side over many reports or turning around.

It also helps to split a change into its parts. A net position can grow because a group added longs or because it closed shorts, and those are different events. The long and short columns of the report show which one happened.

Multi-year extremes as context

A net position of 50,000 contracts can be large in one market and ordinary in another. To compare a position with its own history, many readers place it within its range over several years. The COT Index does exactly that: it puts a group’s current net position on a scale from 0 (the lowest net position of the lookback) to 100 (the highest).

A reading near 0 or 100 describes where positioning stands relative to the past; it says nothing about when, or whether, it will change. Positioning can stay near one end of its range for many reports, and the reading depends on the length of the lookback chosen. That is why readers treat an extreme as context for other information, not as a timing tool.

On COT-Reports.com the COT Index covers every market. The COT Positioning Heatmap shows the multi-year rank of the speculators in every market we analyse over the last 12 reports on one screen, free for everyone (COT Premium adds the other trader groups), and the COT Positioning Analysis pages describe, market by market, where the main groups stand in their range.

Open interest alongside positioning

The CFTC defines open interest as the total of all futures and/or option contracts entered into and not yet offset. Readers look at it next to positioning for two reasons. First, a change in a group’s net position reads differently when open interest is rising (new contracts are being opened) than when it is falling (contracts are being closed). Second, a net position expressed as a share of open interest makes markets of very different sizes comparable.

Comparing report families

The Legacy report’s two big groups are broad. The other families split them more finely:

• Disaggregated (commodity markets): Producer/Merchant/Processor/User, Swap Dealers, Managed Money and Other Reportables.
• Traders in Financial Futures (financial markets): Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional, Leveraged Funds and Other Reportables.
• Supplemental: selected agricultural markets, with the positions of commodity index traders shown on their own.

Many readers use Managed Money or Leveraged Funds as a narrower view of speculative positioning than Legacy’s non-commercials, and compare the Futures Only and Combined versions of the same report to see how much options change the picture. On COT-Reports.com the Legacy tables are free; the Disaggregated, TFF and Supplemental pages and the Combined version are part of COT Premium.

The limits of COT data

Every view above runs into the same limits, and readers who use the report for long usually keep them in mind:

• It is a weekly snapshot. According to the CFTC, the data is generally from Tuesday and released on Friday at 3:30 p.m. ET, a three-day lag; holidays can move the release. Whatever happened after the Tuesday is not in the numbers.
• The schedule is changing. The CFTC announced on 27 October 2026 that it will publish the report twice a week by the end of 2026: data from Monday on Wednesday and data from Wednesday on Friday, both at 3:30 p.m. ET, with the lag falling from three days to two. No start date has been given; until the switch, the weekly schedule applies.
• Positioning is context, not timing. The report says where each group stood on the measurement day. It does not say what any group will do next, and a large position can stay large for months.
• The groups are broad. Each figure adds up many traders, the classification is the CFTC’s, and for the non-reportable group the number of traders and their classification are unknown.
• Only U.S. futures and options markets reported to the CFTC are covered. Positions held elsewhere, such as in spot or over-the-counter markets, are not in the report.

Where to find each view on COT-Reports.com

• Latest COT Report: the newest release for every market, free.
• COT Report Simplified: the net positioning of each market report by report, colour-coded, free.
• COT Data Charts: net positions against price and open interest, the whole history, free without an account.
• COT Index and the COT Positioning Heatmap: positioning within its multi-year range.
• Disaggregated, TFF and Supplemental reports, CSV export: with COT Premium.

To study the numbers in a spreadsheet, any free account can download a sample CSV on the Data Dump page: the Australian Dollar, Legacy Futures Only, the newest 52 reports, in the same format as the full history. A free account also opens up to 10 years of history on the report tables.