TFF vs Disaggregated COT Reports: Which to Read

The CFTC does not publish one Commitments of Traders report. It publishes the same weekly large-trader positions sorted four ways, and the categories in one report do not exist in another. Reading the wrong report, or the right one with the wrong category, gives a number that is correct and answers a different question. This post sets out which report covers which contracts, what each category means in the CFTC’s own definitions, and which one Meaterm reads for each market.

One set of positions, four reports

The CFTC collects confidential daily position data from large traders as part of its market surveillance, and classifies each trader from the Form 40 it files and whatever else CFTC staff know about its business. Each week it publishes a breakdown of the Tuesday’s open interest, for markets in which 20 or more traders hold positions at or above its reporting levels, as four main reports:

• Legacy: split into commercial and non-commercial traders. Its history goes back to 15 January 1986.
• Supplemental: 13 selected agricultural contracts, futures and options combined, with an added category for index traders.
• Disaggregated: physical commodities, in four categories.
• Traders in Financial Futures (TFF): financial contracts, in four different categories.

Legacy, Disaggregated and TFF each come as a futures-only file and a futures-and-options-combined file, in which option positions are converted to futures-equivalents using delta factors supplied by the exchanges. The two files give different numbers for the same week.

The two newer reports arrived in 2009 and 2010. The CFTC began publishing the Disaggregated report on 4 September 2009, for 22 major physical commodity markets, and added the remaining physical markets on 4 December 2009. It announced the TFF report on 22 July 2010. Both carry history back to 13 June 2006, but that history was built afterwards: the CFTC keeps no record of how traders were classified in the past, so it applied recent classifications to old positions, and its notes say this backcasting loses accuracy the further back it goes.

The reason for the change was the legacy “commercial” category. It held producers and merchants hedging a physical business together with swap dealers offsetting risk taken in the over-the-counter market, whoever their counterparty was. A CFTC staff report of September 2008 recommended taking swap dealers out of it, and the Disaggregated report separates the two.

The TFF report: which contracts, which categories

TFF covers financial contracts: in the CFTC’s list, currencies, US Treasury securities, Eurodollars, stocks, the VIX and the Bloomberg commodity index. CME’s bitcoin futures are in the TFF file too, which is where Meaterm reads them. The report divides traders into the sell side and the buy side:

• Dealer/Intermediary: the sell side. Large banks and dealers in securities, swaps and other derivatives, which design and sell financial products to clients and tend to run matched books.
• Asset Manager/Institutional: pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, mutual funds, and portfolio managers whose clients are mainly institutional.
• Leveraged Funds: typically hedge funds and money managers, including registered commodity trading advisors, registered commodity pool operators and unregistered funds identified by the CFTC. Their strategies may be outright positions or arbitrage within and across markets.
• Other Reportables: the rest of the reportable traders, mostly hedging business risk: corporate treasuries, central banks, smaller banks, mortgage originators and credit unions.

Two structural points. In TFF a trader sits in the same category for every contract. And TFF is not a split of the legacy report: a trader in any of its four categories may be a commercial or a non-commercial in the legacy files, so TFF figures do not add back up to legacy ones.

The Disaggregated report: which contracts, which categories

The Disaggregated report covers physical commodities: agriculture, petroleum and products, natural gas and products, electricity, and metals and other physical contracts. Gold and WTI crude oil are both here. Its four categories:

• Producer/Merchant/Processor/User: an entity that mainly produces, processes, packs or handles the physical commodity and uses futures to hedge the risks of that business.
• Swap Dealers: an entity that deals mainly in swaps on the commodity and uses futures to hedge them. Its counterparties may be speculators such as hedge funds, or commercial clients managing physical risk.
• Managed Money: a registered commodity trading advisor, a registered commodity pool operator, or an unregistered fund identified by the CFTC, trading futures on behalf of clients. Hedge funds are included whether or not they are registered.
• Other Reportables: every reportable trader not placed in the first three.

Unlike TFF, the Disaggregated report does add back up to the legacy one: producers and swap dealers together are the old commercials, and managed money and other reportables together are the old non-commercials. And unlike TFF, a trader can be placed in different categories for different commodities.

Which report Meaterm reads, market by market

Meaterm’s public COT pages follow one category per market, from the futures-only files:

Leveraged Funds is the closest thing the TFF report has to a speculative, position-taking group, and Managed Money plays the equivalent role in the Disaggregated report. They are still different categories in different reports. A Leveraged Funds net position in the S&P 500 and a Managed Money net position in gold are not the same measurement, and comparing their sizes says little; comparing each with its own history is what the 156-week percentile on those pages does. The full specification is on the methodology page. The COT module inside the terminal is a different view that shows more of the categories above, and is not what this table describes.

Getting the raw data yourself

Both files Meaterm reads are public and free, need no account, and sit on the CFTC’s Public Reporting Environment:

• Traders in Financial Futures, futures only: dataset gpe5-46if.
• Disaggregated, futures only: dataset 72hh-3qpy.

Match on the dataset id, not the name. The CFTC’s catalogue holds other tables with the same display names: another “TFF - Futures Only” at 98ig-3k9y and another “Disaggregated - Futures Only” at ubmb-6exi, whose rows had not been updated since July 2022 when we checked on 27 October 2026, plus the futures-and-options variants. Searching by name can land you on a different file and a different number.

In both files each row is one contract on one report date. The columns that matter are contract_market_name, report_date_as_yyyy_mm_dd, and the category’s long and short positions: lev_money_positions_long and lev_money_positions_short for Leveraged Funds in TFF, m_money_positions_long_all and m_money_positions_short_all for Managed Money in the Disaggregated file. The suffixes are not consistent between the two files, which is an easy way to end up with an empty column.

Then pick the contract. A name such as “GOLD” or “NASDAQ” matches several contracts, including micro and nano versions whose contract counts are not comparable with the full-size one, and futures on an index’s dividends. Meaterm drops micro, nano and dividend contracts, and for Euro FX and Bitcoin a few look-alikes (euro cross rates; bitcoin perpetual-style, bitcoin cash and ether contracts), then takes the one with the deepest open interest. For the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100 that is the CFTC’s Consolidated row, which counts E-mini contracts with the micro contracts at a tenth each, not the E-mini row alone; it has been counted in those units since the report of 2 May 2023, so the public pages never compare a net from one side of that date with a net from the other. The net position is long minus short, and the percentile ranks it against the same contract’s last 156 weeks. Each contract page links the exact CFTC row behind its figure.

Common misreads

• Category is not intent. In the CFTC’s words, “staff classifies traders, not their trading activity.” Its own example: a hedge fund, in Leveraged Funds, may be using currency futures to hedge the exposure on an over-the-counter position. A producer may be speculating.
• A missing market is not a flat market. When the number of reportable large traders in a contract drops below 20, the contract leaves the report entirely, and it returns once it is back at 20 or more.
• An asset manager’s extreme is not a leveraged fund’s. Asset Manager/Institutional is pension funds, insurers, endowments and mutual funds, money that can hold futures as part of a long-term allocation or as a hedge. A large net long can be that category’s ordinary state rather than a view it has just taken, so compare it with its own history, not with Leveraged Funds.
• Leveraged Funds is not the legacy non-commercial category. TFF is not a split of the legacy report, so the two numbers do not reconcile.
• Futures-only and combined are different numbers. The combined file adds options converted to futures-equivalents; the public pages here use futures only.
• The early history is reconstructed. Disaggregated and TFF figures from before 2009 and 2010 were backcast with later classifications.
• No category predicts anything. These are descriptions of who held what on a Tuesday. A positioning extreme is not a signal; what “crowded” really means explains why.

The CFTC facts above are from its Commitments of Traders pages, its answers to frequently asked questions and its explanatory notes for the Disaggregated and TFF reports, read on 27 October 2026; Meaterm’s choices are specified on the methodology page. This week’s six markets are on the COT report page, and recent reports have dated pages in the weekly archive.

Open the Meaterm terminal free → Charts, a macro dashboard, CFTC COT positioning and fundamentals from SEC filings in one place. Free plan, no card; Pro is €9.99 per month.