Disaggregated COT Report — Simplified

The Disaggregated Futures and Options Combined COT Report is a weekly CFTC publication that breaks reportable traders in physical commodity markets into four categories: Producer/Merchant (commercial hedgers), Swap Dealers (institutional market-makers), Managed Money (hedge funds and CTAs), and Other Reportables (institutional positions not classified elsewhere). It complements the Legacy Futures Only report by providing more granular positioning data for commodities.

The CFTC releases the Disaggregated COT report every Friday at 3:30 PM Eastern Time, reflecting positions as of 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.

Managed Money refers to commodity pool operators, commodity trading advisors (CTAs), and other registered professional money managers. This category includes hedge funds and is widely watched as a proxy for speculative positioning — a rising Managed Money net long means fund managers, as a group, are adding long exposure.

Swap Dealers are entities that deal primarily in swaps for commodities and use futures markets to manage the risk from those swap transactions. They are typically large banks and specialised commodity firms. Managed Money, by contrast, takes directional positions to generate returns for their clients. Swap Dealers are often the counterparty to Managed Money trades.

The Disaggregated COT report covers all physical commodity futures markets including grains (corn, wheat, soybeans), metals (gold, silver, copper, platinum), energies (crude oil, natural gas, heating oil, gasoline), and softs (coffee, sugar, cotton, cocoa). Financial futures (currencies, rates, indices) use the Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) format instead.

When you switch the Group Reports filter from Individual to Bi-Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-Annual or Annual, 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.