COT report glossary
Every term the Commitments of Traders report uses — and every derived metric this site adds — defined in plain language.
This glossary defines the 28 terms needed to read the CFTC's Commitments of Traders report in all three formats, plus the derived metrics (COT index, z-score, percentile) used to interpret it. Each entry is self-contained and individually linkable. For a live worked example, the Jul 21, 2026 report shows gold non-commercials net long 183,910 contracts — the terms below are what that sentence is made of.
The report itself
Commitments of Traders (COT)
The CFTC's weekly publication of open positions in U.S. futures markets, broken down by trader category. Positions are recorded as of Tuesday's close and released Friday at 3:30 p.m. ET. It covers every market where 20 or more traders hold positions at or above CFTC reporting levels.
Legacy report
The original COT format, covering all markets with machine-readable history back to 1986. It divides traders into commercial, non-commercial, and non-reportable. It remains the only format with pre-2006 history.
TFF report (Traders in Financial Futures)
The COT format for financial markets — currencies, rates, equity indexes, and crypto — first published in 2010 with history to June 2006. It classifies reportable traders as dealer/intermediary, asset manager/institutional, leveraged funds, or other reportables, by type of firm rather than hedging status.
Report date vs release date
The report date is the Tuesday whose closing positions the data describes; the release date is the Friday (3:30 p.m. ET) the CFTC publishes it — three days later, more in holiday weeks. Analysis should always be indexed by report date; this site dates every record that way.
Futures-only vs combined
Each COT format is published in two variants: futures-only, and futures-and-options combined, where options positions are converted to futures equivalents using their deltas. The combined variant shows larger totals in markets with active options; comparisons are only valid within one variant.
CFTC contract code
The CFTC's stable identifier for each market in the COT files — for example, 088691 for COMEX gold and 133741 for CME Bitcoin. Codes survive contract renamings, making them the reliable join key for anyone working with the raw files.
Position arithmetic
Open interest
The total number of futures contracts outstanding — each counted once, though every contract has both a long and a short holder. In the Jul 21, 2026 report, gold open interest was 383,368 contracts. Open interest is the denominator that makes positions comparable across markets and eras.
Long / short
A long position profits if the futures price rises; a short profits if it falls. The COT report shows each category's total long contracts and total short contracts separately — the gross positions — before any netting.
Net position
A category's long contracts minus its short contracts, with spread positions excluded. Positive means net long, negative net short. Because every long faces a short, all category nets in a market sum to approximately zero.
Spreading
Positions where the same trader is simultaneously long and short different contract months of the same market, reported as a separate column for reportable categories. Spreads cancel out of the net position by construction, so a market can carry large spreading numbers with little directional exposure.
Trader count
The number of reportable traders in each category, published alongside their positions. Watching positions against counts distinguishes broad shifts from the action of a few large traders; counts below 20 in total drop a market from the report entirely.
Concentration ratios
The share of a market's open interest held by its 4 and 8 largest traders, published gross and net, long side and short side. They are the report's only window into how top-heavy a market is, since individual firms are never identified.
Legacy categories
Commercial
A reportable trader the CFTC classifies as using futures to hedge a business exposure in the underlying commodity — producers, merchants, processors, dealers. Classification is per trader and per market, based on the trader's CFTC Form 40 filing, so a commercial's individual positions are not necessarily hedges.
Non-commercial
A reportable trader without a commercial designation in that market — in practice the large-speculator bucket: hedge funds, CTAs, and other institutional traders taking price risk on purpose. The non-commercial net is the report's most widely quoted number.
Non-reportable
The residual: open interest minus all reportable positions, representing traders below CFTC reporting levels. Commonly called small traders. The category is computed, not filed, and nothing further is known about who is in it.
Disaggregated categories (physical commodities)
Producer / Merchant / Processor / User
The disaggregated category for firms that handle the physical commodity — miners, farmers, refiners, millers, and merchants hedging inventory and production. Together with swap dealers it makes up the legacy commercial category, exactly.
Swap dealer
A firm dealing in commodity swaps that uses futures to hedge the resulting exposure. Its futures position often represents the flows of its swap clients — notably commodity-index investors — rather than a view of its own, which is why the CFTC broke it out of the commercial bucket in 2009.
Managed money
The disaggregated category for registered CTAs, CPOs, and hedge funds trading client capital in physical-commodity futures. It is a subset of the legacy non-commercial category and is the standard proxy for fund positioning in commodities. See the full explainer.
Other reportables
Every reportable trader that fits none of the other disaggregated (or TFF) categories. A deliberately residual bucket; in some markets it is small, in others it carries family offices, corporate treasuries, and other hard-to-classify size.
TFF categories (financial futures)
Dealer / Intermediary
The TFF sell side: banks and market makers who earn spreads by intermediating — taking the other side of client demand and hedging the residual. Their net position tends to mirror the rest of the market's structurally, much as commercials do in physical markets.
Asset manager / Institutional
The TFF category for institutional investors — pension funds, endowments, insurers, and mutual funds. Their futures positions typically implement portfolio allocation and hedging programs, and tend to move more slowly than leveraged-fund positioning.
Leveraged funds
The TFF category for hedge funds and CTAs in financial futures — the analogue of managed money in commodities. It is the line most quoted for "speculative" positioning in currencies, rates, and equity-index futures.
Derived metrics
COT index
The current net position rescaled onto its trailing range:
100 × (net − min) / (max − min) over a lookback window. 0 is the most
net-short reading of the window, 100 the most net-long. FuturesBench publishes 26-,
52-, and 156-week windows — gold's speculative index currently reads 58.0,
26.4, and 46.1 respectively. See
the full explainer.
Z-score
The current net expressed in standard deviations from its trailing mean:
(net − mean) / σ, computed here over 156 weeks with the population
standard deviation. Unlike the COT index it is unbounded, so it can distinguish an
extreme from an unprecedented extreme. Gold's 3-year z-score this week is
-0.49.
Percentile
The share of historical readings at or below the current net, computed by midrank (percent strictly below, plus half of ties). A 95th-percentile net has been exceeded in only 5% of the window's weeks. Percentiles resist outliers better than the COT index, which only the window's min and max can move.
Positioning extreme
A net position at or near the edge of its historical range — commonly operationalized as a long-window COT index above 90 or below 10. An extreme is a description of where positioning sits, not a forecast; historically, extremes have sometimes persisted for months. The extremes screener lists current cases.
Crowded trade
A market where one trader category's position has grown unusually large and one-sided relative to history. The term describes concentration of like-minded positioning — a condition under which the market depends heavily on that group's continued participation — and carries no timing information by itself.
Sign flip
The week a category's net position crosses zero — from net long to net short or back. Flips are rare in markets where a category has a structural side (commercials in gold, for instance, have been net short for most of recorded history), which is why some observers treat them as notable regime markers when they occur.
- Which category is "the funds"?
- In commodities, managed money (disaggregated) or non-commercial (legacy). In financial futures, leveraged funds (TFF). All three are dominated by hedge funds and CTAs but are defined and maintained separately.
- Where do these definitions come from?
- The category definitions summarize the CFTC's explanatory notes for the legacy, disaggregated, and TFF reports. The derived-metric definitions (COT index, z-score, percentile) are this site's own, documented with formulas on the methodology page.
- Can I link to a single definition?
- Yes — every entry has a stable anchor, e.g.
/cot/cot-glossary/#term-managed-money. Definitions are kept self-contained so they read correctly out of context.
Live figures reference the CFTC report dated 2026-07-21 and refresh weekly. CFTC data is a U.S. government work in the public domain.