COT-Reports.com started as a way to make public CFTC data easier to read, and the free tier is still the heart of everything we publish. Most readers never need anything else. This is a tour of what you can use without paying a cent: what is free, where it lives on the site and how far back the free data goes, with a brief note at the end on what lives behind the paid tier.
In short: every one of the 350+ CFTC markets we cover is open to everyone on the free report tables and charts. Without an account, the report tables show the last 3 or 6 months; a free account, which costs nothing, opens year to date and every period up to 10 years; the Charts page draws every market’s whole history for everyone. COT Premium adds the other report families, a custom date range and CSV export.
Free for everyone, without an account
On the site itself, three weekly tables form the core of the free experience. The Simplified table is the one we point new readers to. It presents the net positioning of any market we cover as a colour-coded history of weekly reports, the last 26 by default, 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, 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 of 35 markets in 7 groups, from the major currencies to the stock indices, for readers who want the shortest possible Friday-evening glance.
Alongside the tables, the free tier includes a set of interactive charts. On the COT Data Charts page, every market can be drawn as a historical view of net positioning over its whole history (the Legacy report goes back to 1986), with no account, so you can see the current reading in the context of its own history rather than in isolation.
The Comparison view lines up two markets side by side, over the same period, each with the trader group you pick, so you can 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 grid of the Positioning Heatmap is free too: the speculators’ positioning in every analysed market over the last 12 weekly reports, week by week. On 69 analysis market pages, gold, silver and natural gas among them, a free block reads the latest Legacy report: the net positions of the large speculators, the hedgers and the small traders, the week’s change, and a table of the last 13 reports.
Every page shows the version of the CFTC report it reads by default, for free: Futures Only for the Legacy report. A screenshot of a table costs nothing either, 3 pictures a day without an account. And in an AI assistant, the COT-Reports MCP server answers without an account from the last 26 weekly reports of the Legacy report.
Telegram channel and bot
The @cot_reports Telegram channel is the easiest way to stay current. Every week, after the CFTC release lands (normally on Friday), we post the latest Simplified report of 35 markets, one album per market group, and the Weekly Summary 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.
Free with a free account
A free account costs nothing and opens more history on the same pages. On the report tables and the Comparison page it opens year to date and every period up to 10 years, and on the tables the grouped views of Group Reports (bi-weekly, monthly and the others).
The other free tools grow with it: 15 screenshots a day instead of 3, and 10 years of Legacy history in the MCP server instead of the last 26 reports.
How far back the free data goes
On the report tables (Simplified and Detailed) and on the Comparison page, a visitor without an account picks 3 or 6 months: the last 13 or 26 weekly reports. A free account adds year to date and every period up to 10 years, that is 520 weekly reports.
The Charts page has no such lock: every range, up to the whole history (ALL), is open to everyone. The free grid of the Positioning Heatmap covers the last 12 weekly reports, and the market data block of an analysis page lists the last 13.
The history behind the pages goes further back: the site holds the Legacy report since 1986 and the Disaggregated, TFF and Supplemental reports since 2006. Going past 10 years on a report table takes the custom date range of COT Premium; the Charts page already draws the whole history.
Where to find each free page
Each free tool has its own page: the COT Report Simplified and COT Report Detailed tables, the Weekly Summary, the COT Data Charts, the Comparison page, the Positioning Heatmap, the COT analysis pages by market, the MCP setup guide and the CFTC Release Schedule, which shows when the next report comes out.
The paid tier, in one paragraph
We also run a small paid tier, COT Premium. It is designed for readers who want more advanced tooling: the Disaggregated, TFF and Supplemental reports, the second CFTC version of the Legacy, Disaggregated and TFF reports, a custom date range across the whole history, every trader group on the Positioning Heatmap, Advanced Charts, the Volume Profile, CSV export and screenshots with no daily limit. The 3-month and annual plans also include the "How to Read the Simplified COT Report" 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).
The free tables and charts on COT-Reports.com read the Legacy report, with its three groups (Non-Commercial, Commercial, Non-Reportable); the free heatmap grid and the analysis pages read the speculators from these categories: Managed Money in commodity markets, Leveraged Funds in financial markets. 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 pages on the site adapt accordingly.
