How to Read the Commitments of Traders (COT) Report

The Commitments of Traders report is a free weekly publication from the CFTC that splits a futures market's open interest up by the kind of trader holding it. Each edition accounts for the open interest outstanding on a Tuesday, normally the Tuesday before the Friday it appears, and a market only gets one if at least 20 traders in it hold positions of reportable size.

Reading it well means knowing its boundaries: which positions the CFTC can see, how it labels their holders, and how much of the market sits in a residual line nobody has classified.

What is the Commitments of Traders report?

The Commitments of Traders report is the CFTC's weekly, market-by-market breakdown of open interest by trader type. Open interest, in the sense the report uses, counts the contracts still outstanding — those not offset, delivered against, exercised or otherwise extinguished — and a market's long total matches its short total.

The lineage is long. The CFTC dates the report's ancestry to 1924 and the first of the USDA's annual studies of how much hedging and how much speculation the regulated futures markets were carrying; the agency behind it, the Grain Futures Administration, was the forerunner of the Commodity Exchange Authority, which the CFTC in turn succeeded. Monthly publication started with data as of 30 June 1962, covered 13 agricultural commodities, and landed around the 11th or 12th of the month after the one it described. The CFTC's account of its own history records that the report was proclaimed at the time as "another step forward in the policy of providing the public with current and basic data on futures market operations."

What changed after that was mostly speed and reach. The CFTC moved to two releases a month in 1990, one every two weeks in 1992, and one a week in 2000. Option positions were added in 1995, the same year the report became free on CFTC.gov, and since October 2022 the data has also been published in an environment where it can be searched, filtered and downloaded.

When is the COT report released, and how old is the data?

The futures-only report and the futures-and-options-combined report both come out at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, usually on a Friday, and usually carry data from the previous Tuesday. That is a three-business-day gap by design: the CFTC moved to publishing on the third business day after the "as of" date back in 1992, having cut it from the sixth business day two years earlier.

The schedule is tentative rather than fixed, and federal holidays can push a release back by a day or two. The CFTC publishes the year's expected dates in advance and flags the delayed ones — in 2026 those fall on 5 January, 22 June, 6 July, 16 November, 30 November and 28 December. The four September 2026 releases were scheduled for the 4th, 11th, 18th and 25th.

The practical consequence: on a normal Friday release, the positions in it are three days old, and the market has traded through Wednesday, Thursday and most of Friday since.

Who counts as a reportable trader in the COT report?

A trader becomes reportable when a position reaches the level the CFTC sets for that commodity in its regulations. The filing is done by the firms the Commission calls reporting firms — clearing members, futures commission merchants and foreign brokers — which send it daily position reports under Part 17. The trigger turns on a single expiration: a firm carrying a trader at or above the reporting level in one futures month or one option expiration at the daily close must then report everything that trader holds in the commodity, across every expiration month, however small the rest of it is.

The levels themselves sit in 17 CFR 15.03(b), and they vary enormously by market. As of 1 September 2026, the section lists 1,000 contracts for the S&P 500 stock price index, 200 for other broad-based securities indexes, 350 for sweet crude oil, 200 for gold, 250 for corn, and 25 for all other commodities. The Commission can raise or lower a level in a specific market, balancing the information it needs for oversight against the reporting burden it imposes.

Positions large enough to be caught this way usually make up 70 to 90 percent of a market's open interest. That leaves a real remainder, which the report parks in a single non-reportable line. The identification machinery behind all this is separate: reporting firms file a Form 102A to flag each new account that reaches reportable size, and the Commission may then require the trader to file the fuller Form 40. Between them the forms identify who owns the account and who controls the trading in it, the owner's main line of business, and whether it hedges exposure in the cash market.

What do "commercial" and "non-commercial" mean in the COT report?

In the legacy COT report, a reportable trader is labelled either commercial or non-commercial, and the label is applied to the whole of that trader's reported futures position in a given commodity. The test is hedging as CFTC Regulation 1.3 defines it. In practice an entity gets there by declaring on Form 40 that its business activities are hedged in the futures or option markets, and Commission staff can override that label where they know more about how the entity actually uses the market.

Two features of the labelling trip people up. First, it is per commodity, not per firm: the same trader can be commercial in one market and non-commercial in another, though it cannot be both in the same one. Second, a large organisation can appear on both sides at once through different entities — the CFTC's own illustration is a financial group whose banking arm is classified commercial while a separate money-management arm is classified non-commercial. So "commercials" is not a synonym for a company, and a headline shift in the commercial line can reflect one entity's book rather than an industry's view.

Which COT report should you read?

The CFTC publishes several versions of the same underlying data, each cutting the reportable traders a different way. Which one exists for your market depends on what kind of market it is.

In the disaggregated report, the producer/merchant/processor/user category holds firms whose main business is producing, processing, packing or handling a physical commodity, and which hedge that business in futures; a swap dealer deals primarily in swaps on a commodity and uses futures to manage the resulting risk; managed money covers registered CTAs, registered CPOs and unregistered funds the CFTC has identified, trading on behalf of clients.

The Traders in Financial Futures report, announced in July 2010, splits financial markets into a sell side and a buy side by role rather than by whether a participant is currently long or short. Dealers and intermediaries are the sell side, typically running matched books. The buy side is asset managers and institutions, leveraged funds — hedge funds and money managers — and other reportables such as corporate treasuries, central banks and credit unions. One structural detail matters: the disaggregated report can be re-added back into the legacy commercial and non-commercial totals, but the TFF report cannot, because its four categories draw from both of the legacy ones.

What does "spreading" mean in the COT report?

Spreading is the CFTC's name for the part of one trader's book that cancels itself out, long against short in the same commodity, and in the legacy futures-only report it is worked out for non-commercial traders only. Whatever is left over after that cancelling is what appears as long or short. A non-commercial trader holding 900 long and 400 short in a market therefore contributes 500 to the long line and 400 to spreading.

In the disaggregated and TFF reports the same idea is applied to offsets between one calendar month and another, and to offsets between futures and options, whether the two sit in one month or two. The disaggregated report leaves one category out of it: producer/merchant/processor/user open interest is shown only as long or short. Spreads between separate markets are never counted — the offset has to be inside one commodity. That is worth remembering around a quarterly roll, when positions in two contract months can sit side by side in the same account.

Two other columns mislead if you read them casually. The trader counts do not add up: a trader is counted once in the market total but again in every category it holds a position in, so the category counts often add up to more than the market's. And the non-reportable line is not a measured quantity at all — it is what remains after total reportable longs and shorts are subtracted from total open interest, which means the number of traders in it and their commercial or non-commercial character are simply unknown.

What can the COT report not tell you?

The COT report cannot tell you what any individual trader is doing, and it cannot tell you with certainty that a category's positions match the label on the category. Both limits are structural, and the CFTC states them itself.

The confidentiality limit comes from statute. Under Section 8 of the Commodity Exchange Act, 7 U.S.C. 12, the Commission may not make a person's positions, transactions or trade secrets public outside a few limited circumstances, and it says the COT figures are aggregated for exactly that reason: so that no individual reportable trader can be picked out of them. Where a TFF category has fewer than four active traders in a commodity, the position size is published but the trader count is withheld.

The classification limit is subtler, and the CFTC is candid about it in both sets of explanatory notes: what gets sorted into a category is the trader, not each trade it makes. A trader is placed in the category matching its predominant business, so a fund sitting in the leveraged funds bucket may nevertheless be using a futures position to hedge an over-the-counter exposure, and a firm in the producer/merchant/processor/user bucket may be doing some swaps business. Classifications also move over time as a trader's use of the markets changes or the Commission learns more. That last point is why the TFF history the CFTC backcast to 13 June 2006 gets less reliable the further back you read: no record was kept of how large traders were classified in the past, so today's labels had to be applied to positions from years earlier.

What does the COT report mean for a funded futures trader?

For someone trading a funded futures account intraday, the COT report is context rather than input. It arrives once a week, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern and usually on a Friday, describing Tuesday. Nothing about that cadence matches a position held for minutes or hours, and everything in it is position data — open interest by category, the change since the previous report, percentages of open interest and trader counts — describing a market three days earlier.

The scale gap is worth internalising too. As of 1 September 2026, a position in the S&P 500 stock price index becomes reportable at 1,000 contracts, far above the contract ceiling on our own simulated funded accounts, which the contract limits article sets out, and the instruments we list show which CME, CBOT, COMEX and NYMEX markets those limits apply to. If you are weighing contract size, the mechanics are in our post on Micro E-mini versus E-mini futures.

There is also a reason a simulated funded account never appears in this data at all. Open interest, in the COT sense, is the contracts still outstanding in a market, and what the Commission sees of it comes from clearing members, FCMs and foreign brokers. An order filled inside a simulator never reaches a market, so it is not part of that count — a distinction we covered in sim trading versus live trading. What the report offers is a description of the large traders whose orders do reach the market, published for transparency rather than as a trading signal.

FAQ

Is the Commitments of Traders report free?

Yes. The COT report has been freely available on cftc.gov since 1995. Before that it was sold: an electronic product you paid for from 1993, and a mailing list you subscribed to before that. Since October 2022 the CFTC has also run a public reporting environment, where the data can be queried and pulled down in a chosen format rather than read out of the published files. Historical coverage on the site runs back to 1986 for futures-only reports, 1995 for options-and-futures-combined, and 2006 for the supplemental report.

Why is COT data three days old?

Because the release is scheduled for the third business day after the "as of" date. Reporting firms file daily position reports with the CFTC, the Commission compiles Tuesday's open interest, and the futures-only and futures-and-options-combined reports come out at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, usually on Friday. The CFTC shortened this gap twice — to the sixth business day in 1990 and to the third in 1992 — and a federal holiday can still put a release a day or two later.

Does the COT report show retail traders' positions?

Not identifiably. Positions below the CFTC's reporting levels fall into the non-reportable line, which the CFTC arrives at as a leftover: total open interest, less the reportable long and short totals. The CFTC says plainly that on that line it knows neither how many traders are behind the figure nor how each of them would be classified, commercial or not. Since reported positions usually represent 70 to 90 percent of a market's open interest, the non-reportable remainder is typically the smaller share and carries no detail.

What is the difference between the legacy and disaggregated COT reports?

The legacy report sorts reportable traders into commercial and non-commercial. The disaggregated report, which covers physical commodity markets, splits those two into four: producer/merchant/processor/user and swap dealers on the commercial side, managed money and other reportables on the other. Because it is a subdivision, the disaggregated figures can be re-aggregated back to the legacy pair. The Traders in Financial Futures report is not a subdivision in that sense and cannot be.