What is the COT report?

The Commitments of Traders report, explained from the primary source.

The Commitments of Traders (COT) report is a weekly publication of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) showing the open positions held in U.S. futures markets, broken down by category of trader. It is compiled from position data that futures commission merchants, clearing members, and foreign brokers are required to file with the Commission, and it covers every market in which 20 or more traders hold positions at or above CFTC reporting levels.

The timing

Positions are recorded as of Tuesday's close and published on Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time. When a federal holiday intervenes, the CFTC shifts the release — the data date stays a Tuesday, and publication slips to the next business day. So the numbers you read on Friday are three days old by design; what matters for analysis is the week-over-week change, not the level on the day you read it.

The three report formats

Legacy

The original format, with history back to 1986 in machine-readable form. Traders are split into commercial (hedgers with an underlying business exposure), non-commercial (large speculators — funds and other reportable traders without a hedging exemption), and non-reportable (positions below reporting levels, often called small traders).

Disaggregated

Since 2009 (data from 2006), physical-commodity markets are split further: producer/merchant/processor/user, swap dealers, managed money, and other reportables. "Managed money" is the closest thing to a clean read on hedge-fund positioning in commodities.

Traders in Financial Futures (TFF)

The equivalent split for financial markets (currencies, rates, equity indexes): dealer/intermediary, asset manager/institutional, leveraged funds, and other reportables.

Why traders read it

Because positioning is a fact, not an opinion. The COT report is the only public, regulator-collected record of who is long and who is short in U.S. futures. Common uses:

• Extremes. When a category's net position reaches the edge of its historical range (see the COT index), the market has historically often been crowded — a condition worth knowing about, whatever you do with it.
• Commercial behavior. Commercial hedgers typically fade price moves — they sell into strength and buy weakness as a byproduct of hedging. Divergences between commercial and speculative positioning are the classic thing to watch.
• Confirmation of themes. A price trend accompanied by expanding open interest and expanding speculative positioning tells a different story than the same trend with shrinking participation.

What it can't tell you

The report has real limits: it is aggregated (you cannot see any single firm), delayed three days, futures-and-options-on-futures only (no OTC or cash positions), and the category assignment is per-trader, not per-trade — a "commercial" can still hold a speculative position. It is a positioning record, not a prediction. FuturesBench never attaches buy or sell language to it.

Where the data on this site comes from

Every number on FuturesBench comes from the CFTC's own published files — the weekly flat files at cftc.gov and the CFTC's public Socrata datasets, cross-checked against each other on every ingest. History runs back to 1986 for legacy markets and 2006 for disaggregated and TFF. The data is U.S. government work in the public domain, and we republish it unaggregated and without a login, with every derived metric documented.