Simplified COT Report

The Simplified COT Report is a compact weekly table showing one trader category at a time, Non-Commercial (large speculator) positions by default, for any CFTC futures market. It surfaces long, short, net positions and weekly changes in one view — designed for traders who track speculative positioning without the noise of commercial hedging activity.

Net Position equals Non-Commercial Long minus Non-Commercial Short contracts. A positive value means large speculators are collectively net long (more long than short); a negative value means net short. The weekly change column shows whether the speculative bias is strengthening or unwinding.

Non-Commercials are large speculative traders — primarily hedge funds, commodity trading advisors (CTAs) and proprietary trading firms — that hold reportable positions but do not use the futures market for commercial hedging. They are widely used as the speculative-sentiment proxy.

The Simplified COT Report on this page is rebuilt every Friday at 3:30 PM Eastern Time the moment the CFTC releases new data. Positions reflect the previous Tuesday's close. When a US federal holiday falls on the Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of that week, the release moves to the next business day, usually the following Monday — a Monday holiday such as Labor Day does not delay it.

The Simplified report shows one trader category at a time (Non-Commercial by default). The Detailed report shows all three categories — Non-Commercial, Commercial and Non-Reportable — with long, short, net and percentage of open interest for each. Simplified is faster to scan; Detailed gives the complete picture.

When you switch the Group Reports filter from Individual to Bi-Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Half-Year or Yearly, the underlying weekly CFTC reports are combined as follows. Snapshot columns (Long, Short, Spreading, Open Interest) are averaged across the period — a monthly row shows the average position across the 4-5 weeks that fall inside that month. Flow columns (Change Long, Change Short, Change OI) are summed, because they represent weekly deltas and the period total is the cumulative flow. NET % CHANGE uses an endpoint formula: it compares the net position in the last week of the period to the net position in the first week, expressed as a percentage. The small ×N chip on the DATE cell shows exactly how many weekly reports were aggregated into that row.