Supplemental COT Report — Simplified

The Supplemental Commodity Index Traders (CIT) COT Report is a weekly CFTC publication that covers 13 agricultural futures markets and uniquely breaks out Index Traders — commodity index funds such as those tracking the S&P GSCI or Bloomberg Commodity Index. The Supplemental format is the only COT report that isolates this category, making it essential for tracking index-fund flows into agriculture.

The CFTC releases the Supplemental 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.

Index Traders are entities whose reported positions are predominantly driven by tracking a major commodity index such as the S&P GSCI (Goldman Sachs Commodity Index) or the Bloomberg Commodity Index (BCOM). They include index funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and swap dealers hedging their index-linked swap exposure. Their positioning is usually passive and long-biased.

The Supplemental CIT report covers 13 agricultural futures markets: corn, wheat (Chicago and Kansas City), soybeans, soybean oil, soybean meal, live cattle, feeder cattle, lean hogs, cocoa, coffee, sugar #11, and cotton. These are the markets where commodity index funds have meaningful exposure.

The Disaggregated report breaks Commercial traders into Producer/Merchant and Swap Dealers, and breaks Non-Commercial into Managed Money and Other Reportables — a finer breakdown for hedgers and speculators. The Supplemental report uses the traditional Non-Commercial / Commercial / Non-Reportable framework but adds Index Traders as a separate category. Most professional commodity analysts cross-reference both.

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.