REFERENCE

Every term in the COT Report, defined.

A reference for CFTC trader categories, report formats and positioning metrics. Cite directly — definitions are structured for AI search engines and follow CFTC-official wording.

35defined terms6categories6languagesSourced from the official CFTC glossary

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Report formats

Commitments of Traders (COT) Report: Weekly publication by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) showing futures market positioning by trader category. Released every Friday at 3:30 PM Eastern Time.
Futures Only (Legacy): The original CFTC COT format. Includes only futures contracts (not options) and breaks traders into Non-Commercial, Commercial and Non-Reportable. The COT report itself dates to 1962; downloadable historical data on cftc.gov begins in 1986.
Disaggregated: CFTC COT format introduced in September 2009. Splits commodity reporters into four categories — Producer/Merchant, Swap Dealers, Managed Money, Other Reportables — for finer positioning analysis.
Traders in Financial Futures (TFF): CFTC COT format introduced in June 2010. Splits financial futures reporters into four categories — Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional, Leveraged Funds, Other Reportables.
Supplemental Commodity Index Traders: CFTC COT format introduced in 2007. Tracks 13 agricultural markets and uniquely isolates Index Traders (commodity index funds) as a separate category.

Trader categories

Non-Commercial: Large speculative traders — primarily hedge funds, CTAs and proprietary trading firms — that hold reportable positions but do not use the futures market for commercial hedging. Used as the speculative-sentiment proxy in the Legacy COT format.
Commercial: Hedgers — entities that use the futures market primarily to offset price risk in their underlying business (e.g. an oil producer selling futures, an airline buying futures). They usually trade against the trend — selling into strength and buying into weakness.
Non-Reportable: Traders whose position size is below the CFTC reporting threshold. Effectively retail and small institutional positioning. Often interpreted as a contrarian sentiment indicator at extremes.
Managed Money: Disaggregated COT category for commodity pool operators, commodity trading advisors (CTAs) and other registered professional money managers — including hedge funds. The closest analogue to Non-Commercial in the more granular Disaggregated format.
Swap Dealers: Disaggregated COT category for entities that deal primarily in commodity swaps and use futures to hedge those swap positions. Typically large banks and specialised commodity firms. Often the counterparty to Managed Money trades.
Producer/Merchant/Processor/User: Disaggregated COT category for entities engaged in the physical production, processing, packing or handling of the underlying commodity — the textbook commercial hedger.
Other Reportables: Disaggregated COT category for reportable traders who are not Producer/Merchant, Swap Dealers or Managed Money. Often includes proprietary trading firms and other institutional positions.
Index Traders: Supplemental COT category specifically for entities whose positions are driven by tracking a major commodity index (e.g. S&P GSCI, Bloomberg Commodity Index). Includes index funds, ETFs and swap dealers hedging index-linked swap exposure.
Dealer/Intermediary: TFF COT category for large institutional market-makers in financial futures — typically the dealing desks of major banks and broker-dealers.
Asset Manager/Institutional: TFF COT category for pension funds, endowments, insurance companies and mutual funds. Holds longer-term positions for asset allocation rather than short-term speculation.
Leveraged Funds: TFF COT category for hedge funds, CTAs and other speculative money managers that take directional positions on financial markets. The financial-futures equivalent of Managed Money.

Positioning metrics

Open Interest: Total number of futures contracts opened and not yet closed, expired or delivered. Measures market participation. Rising open interest with rising price typically confirms an uptrend.
Net Position: Long contracts minus Short contracts for a given trader category. Positive means net long (bullish exposure); negative means net short (bearish exposure).
Long Position: A bet that the underlying market will rise. In the COT report, each trader category's long total is the sum of contracts held that profit when the price goes up.
Short Position: A bet that the underlying market will fall. In the COT report, each trader category's short total is the sum of contracts held that profit when the price goes down.
Spreading Position: Contracts held in offsetting long and short positions in different contract months of the same market. Spreading is essentially neutral — it captures price differentials between months rather than directional moves. Reported separately so it doesn't distort the directional Net Position read.
% of Open Interest: A trader category's net or gross position divided by the total Open Interest of the market, expressed as a percentage. Normalizes positions across markets of different sizes — a 100K Net Position means very different things in a deep-liquidity SOFR contract versus a thinly-traded soft commodity.
Concentration Ratio: The percentage of total Open Interest held by the four or eight largest traders in a market. Published in the CFTC's full-format COT reports. High concentration (>40% in the top 4) signals the market is dominated by a few big players — moves can be sharp when one of them rotates.
Net Change: The week-over-week difference in a trader category's Net Position. Positive Net Change means the category bought more / covered shorts during the reporting week; negative means they sold or shorted into the close. The most-watched single metric on every COT release.

Release cycle

As-of Tuesday: The COT Report always reflects open positions at the close of business on the Tuesday of the reporting week. The Tuesday close is the snapshot date — published three days later on the Friday of the same week.
Reporting Lag: The three-day gap between the Tuesday snapshot and the Friday publication. The CFTC uses this window to aggregate, validate and anonymize the data. Every COT report you read is exactly three business days old by design.
Release Time: CFTC publishes the weekly COT report every Friday at 3:30 PM Eastern Time. When a US federal holiday falls on the Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of that week (e.g. Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Juneteenth, Independence Day observed, Christmas), the release moves to the following Monday at the same 3:30 PM ET slot.

Analysis & signals

COT Index: A normalized score (0–100) showing where a trader category's current Net Position sits relative to its rolling historical range. 0 = most short ever in the lookback window, 100 = most long ever. Used to spot extreme positioning. Common windows: 26, 52, 156 weeks.
Percentile Rank: The percentage of historical readings that the current value exceeds. A Net Position at the 95th percentile means it's higher than 95% of readings over the lookback period — historically extreme, often a contrarian signal.
Extreme Reading: An informal label for a positioning value at the very edge of its historical range — typically 0–5 (extreme short) or 95–100 (extreme long) on the COT Index. Markets often turn at these extremes because the dominant side has run out of new buyers / sellers.
Z-Score: Number of standard deviations the current Net Position is from its rolling mean. Z = +2 means current is 2σ above the average — a 1-in-40 reading historically. An alternative to COT Index for measuring positioning extremity, more sensitive to volatility shifts.
Divergence: When price action and trader positioning move in opposite directions. Example: price makes a new high but Non-Commercial Net Position shrinks. Often interpreted as a leading signal that the trend is losing institutional commitment.

Contract mechanics

Contract Month: The calendar month in which a futures contract expires. The CFTC aggregates positions across all listed contract months of a market, so the COT Net Position represents the entire futures complex, not just the front month.
Notional Value: The dollar value of one futures contract — calculated as the contract multiplier times the current price. A WTI Crude futures contract at $80/bbl has a notional of $80,000 (1,000 barrels × $80). Useful for sizing comparisons across markets.
Settlement Price: The official end-of-day reference price for a futures contract, set by the exchange. Used to mark-to-market open positions, calculate margin and trigger contract-related events. The Tuesday settlement is what the COT 'as-of' snapshot anchors to.

Definitions are based on the official CFTC Commitments of Traders glossary and formatted for readability.

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