What COT-Reports.com Offers for Free

Telegram channel and bot

The @cot_reports Telegram channel is the easiest way to stay current. Every Friday, after the CFTC release lands, we post the latest Simplified and Detailed summaries straight into the channel as clean, readable graphics you can open on your phone. No app, no login, no newsletter required. The channel has grown to more than 12,000 members and is still free to follow.

The @cotreports_bot Telegram bot is the companion. It lets you browse the markets we cover on demand, pull up recent publications from the archive, and get a short menu of the most common actions without leaving Telegram. Both the channel and the bot are public and cost nothing to use — and we plan to keep it that way.

The weekly tables: Simplified, Detailed, Summaries

On the site itself, three weekly tables form the core of the free experience. The Simplified table is the one we recommend to new readers. It presents the net positioning of every market we cover in a single colour-coded 52-week history, so extremes and reversals are visible at a glance without any calculation.

The Detailed table goes one layer deeper. It breaks open interest down by trader category — the same numbers the CFTC publishes, but re-presented in a dense, readable format that fits on one screen per market. Finally, the Weekly Summary compresses the newest release into one condensed readout per market family, for readers who want the shortest possible Friday-evening glance.

Charts and the Comparison view

Alongside the tables, the free tier includes a set of interactive charts. Every market has its own page with a historical view of net positioning over several years, so you can see the current reading in the context of its own history rather than in isolation.

The Comparison view is a newer addition. It lets you line up two or more markets side by side — the same metric, the same timeframe — and see where positioning stories overlap or diverge. It is a useful way to spot rotations between related contracts (say, crude and gasoline, or gold and silver) without having to flip between tabs.

The paid tier, in one paragraph

We also run a small paid tier. It is designed for readers who want more advanced tooling — the Disaggregated, TFF and Supplemental reports, the Positioning Heatmap, Advanced Charts and CSV export — and the "How to Read the COT Reports" guide, which covers the interpretation side in real depth. The paid tier exists to fund the rest of the platform. Nothing that is free today is going to move behind it.

Reference: trader categories in the Disaggregated and TFF reports

Since many readers arrive looking for a quick definition of the CFTC’s trader categories, here they are in one place. The Disaggregated report, used for physical commodity markets, has four categories: Producer / Merchant / Processor / User (the real-world commercial side), Swap Dealers (intermediaries hedging over-the-counter swap exposures), Managed Money (hedge funds, CTAs and registered managed-futures programs), and Other Reportables (a residual bucket for reporting traders who do not fit the first three).

The Traders in Financial Futures report, used for financial markets — equity index futures, currencies, treasuries — has its own four categories: Dealer / Intermediary (large banks and sell-side brokers), Asset Manager / Institutional (pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies and other real-money institutions), Leveraged Funds (hedge funds, CTAs and similar leveraged speculative programs), and Other Reportables (again the residual bucket).

Every free table and chart on COT-Reports.com uses these categories in the background. You do not have to memorise them to get value from the data — you only have to know that the vocabulary changes between commodity and financial markets, and that the tables on the site adapt accordingly.