Commitments of Traders Report (COT)

The report is released by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) every Friday. All open US futures positions on Tuesdays are collated and tabulated for the report. As you can see there is a 3 day gap between tabulation and release. The report also contains corresponding options. 

The report will show the open positions of 2 categories:
1) Reportable
2) Non-Reportable

The Reportable are divided into 2 types of traders:
1) Commercials (eg. Producers of crops, large buyers of cocoa like Hershey who use it for their business, etc)
2) Non-Commercials aka Large Speculators (eg. Hedge funds, trading houses, etc)

The Non-Reportables are usually small speculators/traders.

CFTC has since released a different set of report format. The above which I have explained is now called the Legacy COT report. The new one is called the Disaggregated Commitments of Traders Report. I will go through the new format in later posts. I will go through the Legacy COT report in later posts so that you can understand the difference between the two.

In the next post, I will show you next on how the reports are formatted and how to read and understand the main numbers.

Comments

  1. Vineet25 June 2011 at 14:54

    very informative is the COT, but i bileive it is mostly the commodity traders who use it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Uncle Ti 8827 June 2011 at 11:51

    Yes most commodity traders use the COT to see the main direction of the trend. However we are able to simulate the COT to see the main direction for stocks as well.

    ReplyDelete

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