What Is the COT Report? A Beginner’s Guide

The Commitments of Traders report, usually called the COT report, is a weekly breakdown of positions in futures markets published by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It helps answer a question a price chart cannot: how are different groups of traders positioned in this market?

You can browse COT reports and charts on Tradingster for individual markets. Before interpreting the numbers, it helps to understand what the report measures, which version you are reading, and why the report date matters.

What does a COT report actually show?

A COT report records outstanding positions, not every trade made during the week. The table separates long and short holdings by trader category and shows changes from the previous report. It also provides open interest: the number of contracts that remain open.

Think of it as a photograph of positioning, rather than a recording of trading activity. Two photographs can show that a group’s position changed. They cannot tell you everything that happened between them.

For example, imagine a group had 80,000 long contracts and 50,000 short contracts. Its net position would be 30,000 contracts long. That describes the balance of its reported holdings. It does not mean 30,000 people expect the market to rise, or that the market has more buyers than sellers overall.

Every open futures contract has a long side and a short side. What makes the report useful is the distribution of those positions among groups, not an imbalance between the market’s total longs and shorts.

Which markets does it cover?

COT reports cover a range of commodity and financial futures markets. Tradingster’s directory includes metals, energy, agricultural products, currencies, stock indexes and interest-rate markets.

The gold COT report, for example, concerns a particular exchange-traded gold futures market. It is not a census of everyone who owns gold. Similarly, currency futures positioning is not the same as the positions held by every participant in the global foreign-exchange market.

Always read the contract name and exchange at the top of a report. A familiar label such as “oil” can refer to more than one contract, and those reports are not interchangeable.

When is the COT report released?

The normal release time is Friday at 3:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time, with positions measured as of the preceding Tuesday. Holiday schedules and other publication disruptions can change the usual timing.

That gap is important. A report published on Friday does not describe positions at Friday’s close. A major price move on Wednesday or Thursday may already have changed the market before you read the latest available figures.

Use the “as of” date shown on the report, rather than assuming that the day you opened the page is the date of the data. Tradingster’s COT data and chart help provides additional background on the reports and their updates.

Why are there different COT reports?

The main formats answer related questions with different trader classifications.

The Legacy report uses broad commercial and non-commercial categories for reportable traders. The Disaggregated report gives a more detailed breakdown for physical commodity markets. The Traders in Financial Futures report, often shortened to TFF, uses categories designed for financial futures.

You can start with the Legacy futures report directory for the broad grouping. When moving to a different report family, read its category names again rather than treating a similarly sized position as the same series.

There is another distinction: futures-only data versus futures-and-options-combined data. The latter expresses options exposure on a futures-equivalent basis. A weekly comparison only makes sense when both observations use the same contract, report family and position basis.

What can you learn from positioning?

A useful first question is whether a group is net long or net short. A better second question is how that balance has changed.

Suppose net longs rise from 30,000 to 45,000 contracts. The group became more net long, but several combinations of changes could produce that result. Long holdings could have grown, short holdings could have fallen, or both could have happened. Reading the separate columns gives you more information than the net figure alone.

History adds another layer. A net position of 45,000 may be close to the middle of one market’s recent range and unusually high in another. The number needs a comparison, not a label attached in isolation.

These are questions about participation and exposure. They can help you frame a market view, but they do not settle whether today’s price is attractive.

What the report cannot tell you

The COT report does not reveal each trader’s entry price, full portfolio, intended holding period or reasons for changing a position. A short futures holding could be part of a hedge rather than a standalone bet on falling prices.

It also does not supply the date of the next turning point. Positioning can remain one-sided while a price trend continues. Calling a position “large” or “extreme” does not explain what would make holders change it.

For a first reading, keep the task modest: identify one market, check the report date and type, then compare a group’s current holdings with the previous week and its own history. Once those pieces are clear, the table becomes useful evidence rather than a collection of bullish and bearish labels.

Methodology: Report coverage and the normal publication schedule follow the CFTC’s reporting overview. The numerical example is hypothetical. This article is educational, not a trade recommendation.