The COT report is going twice weekly

What the CFTC has said, what has only been reported, and what changes for anyone who reads Commitments of Traders data. Updated October 27, 2026.

What is official and what is reported

There are two sources, and they do not say the same amount.

Official. Speaking at the Agricultural Commodity Futures Conference in Overland Park, Kansas on October 22, 2026, Chairman Selig said: "That's why we are working internally to publish the COT report twice a week by the end of the year, giving market participants access to more timely information about trading positions and activity in these markets." The transcript is on cftc.gov. It names no days, no times and no start date beyond "by the end of the year".

Reported. On October 26 Reuters reported, citing a presentation by another CFTC official at the same event, that publication would begin in December on Wednesdays at 3:30 p.m. Eastern covering data through the preceding Monday, and on Fridays at 3:30 p.m. Eastern covering data through the preceding Wednesday, with the usual next-working-day rule for holidays. Bloomberg carried the twice-weekly plan on October 27 without the day-level detail. As of this page's last update the CFTC's own COT special announcements page carries nothing about it, and the release schedule page still shows the weekly Friday calendar.

Everything below that depends on the day-level detail should be read as "if the reported schedule holds". This page will be corrected the day the CFTC publishes the schedule.

Why the CFTC is doing it

Selig framed it as a response to agricultural users: "We heard from the ag community that the commitments report can be more useful, so we listened." Grain and livestock hedgers have long complained that a Tuesday snapshot released Friday afternoon is stale by the time the next week's trading starts, especially around USDA report days and harvest. A Wednesday release with Monday data roughly halves the maximum age of the newest positioning read.

The reported new rhythm, side by side

What it changes for anyone analysing COT data

"Week-over-week" stops meaning one thing

Today every change in a COT series spans exactly seven days. Under the reported schedule the change from one report to the next alternates between two days and five days. A 40,000-contract swing between Monday and Wednesday is a different event from the same swing between Wednesday and the following Monday, which contains two more sessions and a weekend. Report-over-report changes will need to be read against the length of the interval, or compared like with like: Monday against the prior Monday, Wednesday against the prior Wednesday, which restores a seven-day change for each of the two tracks.

Lookback windows need to be measured in time, not reports

Most published COT metrics, including the COT index and its usual 26-week, 52-week and 3-year lookbacks, are defined as a number of weekly observations. If a tool keeps counting observations, 52 reports will cover only 26 weeks once there are two a week, and a "3-year" index quietly becomes an 18-month one. The right fix is to define the window by calendar time (the last 364 days, the last 1,092 days) and let the number of observations inside it be whatever it is. FuturesBench's COT index and every other windowed metric are being moved to calendar windows ahead of the change, so a 3-year index here will still mean three years.

History becomes a mixed-frequency series

Weekly Tuesday data back to 1986 will be followed by twice-weekly Monday and Wednesday data. Anything that lines up "the same week last year" has to decide which of the two snapshots corresponds to an old Tuesday. The clean options are to compare against the nearest snapshot by date, or to keep a derived weekly series built from one of the two days. The interval between the last Tuesday report and the first Monday report will itself be an odd length and should not be treated as a normal weekly change.

Extremes and records will be set more often

Twice as many observations means twice as many chances to print a new high or low in net positioning, and intra-week moves that used to be invisible will show up as records. A "record net short" after the change is still a record, but the denominator of opportunities has doubled, which matters if you count how often extremes occur.

The mid-week read is the new information

The Friday report will now describe Wednesday, which already includes the response to most Tuesday and Wednesday scheduled data. The Wednesday report, describing Monday, will capture positioning as of the first session after the weekend. For agricultural markets that is the point: a USDA report on a Thursday or Friday will show up in the following Wednesday release instead of a week and a half later.

What does not change

• The three report formats, the trader categories inside them, and the reporting thresholds that decide who is counted. Nothing of the kind has been announced.
• The source files. The CFTC has said nothing about format changes to the flat files or the public data API. Until it does, a reasonable assumption is the same files with more rows and non-Tuesday dates, which is also what FuturesBench's ingest is being prepared for.
• The principle that analysis is indexed by report date, not release date. It just becomes more important, because two different release days will now carry two different report dates every week.

What FuturesBench will do

• Publish both reports, minutes after each release. Since October 27, 2026 the ingest accepts Monday- and Wednesday-dated reports (it used to require a Tuesday), opens its fast polling window on Wednesday afternoons as well as Fridays, and checks every 30 minutes in between, so a Wednesday drop is picked up the same way a Friday one is.
• Keep every window in calendar time. Done, same date: the COT index, percentiles, z-scores and records are computed over calendar windows (26 weeks, 52 weeks, 3 years) regardless of how many reports fall inside them. On weekly history the numbers are identical to the old report-count windows; the methodology has the definitions.
• Name the interval. The change column on every market page now reads "change since prior report". While reports are weekly that is still a week-over-week change; once they arrive two and five days apart, the pages will carry the number of days.
• Add a like-for-like weekly change once the first twice-weekly report lands: the change against the same weekday's prior report, so a seven-day comparison survives.
• Keep the API additive. Existing fields keep their meaning; the new cadence shows up as more rows. Any new field (the days since the previous report, for example) is added, never substituted.
• Send the email recap after every release, which will mean twice a week.

Open questions

• The exact first twice-weekly release date. "December" and "by the end of the year" are all that has been said.
• Whether the CFTC will publish a transition week with both a Tuesday and a Monday snapshot, or simply switch.
• Whether the flat-file layouts, the historical compressed archives, or the Socrata public data API change in any way.
• How the 2026 and 2027 holiday calendars will be expressed once there are two release days to shift.

Sources: CFTC, Remarks at Agricultural Commodity Futures Conference, October 22, 2026; Reuters, "US CFTC to begin twice-weekly Commitments of Traders reports in December", October 26, 2026; Bloomberg, "CFTC Plans Twice-Weekly Commitments of Traders Report by Year-End", October 27, 2026. Day-level schedule details are attributed to the Reuters report and have not been confirmed by a CFTC publication. See also: the current release schedule, adjusting COT analysis for twice-weekly data, what the COT report is.