The Commitments of Traders (COT) report is a weekly snapshot of who holds what in the US futures markets. The CFTC — the federal regulator — requires large traders to report their positions, then publishes the aggregate every Friday afternoon. It is one of the few genuinely public windows into how professional money is positioned.
Positions are measured on Tuesday and published the following Friday at about 15:30 ET. That three-day lag matters: the report tells you where traders were, not where they are now.
The three cohorts
Every contract has a long and a short side, so the three groups always net to zero between them. What matters is who is on each side.
- Large speculators (the CFTC calls them non-commercial) — hedge funds and managed money. They trade to profit from price, they tend to follow trends, and they are the cohort most people mean when they say "the COT report."
- Commercials — producers, refiners, miners, banks and industrial users hedging real physical or balance-sheet exposure. A gold miner selling forward is short gold futures without being bearish. They are usually the mirror image of the speculators.
- Small traders (non-reportable) — everyone below the reporting threshold, aggregated.
How to read it — and how not to
Positioning is descriptive, not predictive. It tells you how traders are already placed. A crowded net-long position means a lot of people already own the trade, which is context — not a forecast, and not a reason to do anything in particular.
Three practical cautions. First, the three-day lag: positions are measured on Tuesday and published Friday, so a sharp mid-week move is invisible until the following report. Second, commercial shorts are not bearish bets — they are hedges against physical inventory. Third, the level matters more than the sign: some markets sit structurally net short for years, so "net short" alone says little. The 3-year range column is there to give the current reading a sense of scale.
For currency pairs, note that the CFTC reports positioning in the currency's own futures contract, not in the pair you trade. Speculators net long Japanese Yen futures corresponds to net short USD/JPY. Each market page flags this where it applies.
Where this data comes from
Straight from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the US federal regulator, via their public reporting API. It is a US government work and therefore public domain. We use the Legacy, futures-only report — the classic three-cohort breakdown. We publish it unchanged; the commentary is ours.