Commitment of Traders Report
The Commitment of Traders Report is a weekly publication by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that discloses the aggregate long and short futures positions held by large commercial and non-commercial participants.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has published Commitment of Traders (COT) data since 1962, with the weekly Friday release becoming a standard reference for futures market analysts. The report breaks down open interest in major futures markets — including equity index futures, Treasury futures, commodity futures, and currency futures — into categories based on the classification of the reporting entity.
The primary classifications in the traditional COT report are Commercials, who are entities that use futures to hedge underlying business exposure, and Non-Commercials (often called Large Speculators), who are large traders without a hedging rationale. A third category covers small, non-reporting traders whose positions are inferred from total open interest.
Historically, analysts interpreted extreme positioning by either group as a potential contrarian signal. When large speculators accumulated historically large net long positions in a given market, subsequent historical data sometimes showed that those positions were built near price peaks before a mean-reversion episode. Commercials, being natural hedgers, frequently held net short positions in markets where they had underlying long exposure, and historical analysis showed that periods of extreme commercial net long positioning had sometimes coincided with market lows.
The CFTC later introduced the Disaggregated COT report, which separates participants into four categories — Producer/Merchant, Swap Dealer, Managed Money, and Other Reportables — offering more granular visibility into which institutional segment held which position. The Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) supplement covers financial futures specifically.
COT data carries a reporting lag, typically reflecting positions as of Tuesday of the release week with publication on Friday. Analysts historically used the data as a longer-horizon sentiment gauge rather than a short-term timing mechanism, observing shifts in positioning trends over weeks and months rather than treating any single week's release as a standalone signal.