COT report data, charted and explained

What the COT report is

Every week the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) publishes the Commitments of Traders report — normally on Friday at 3:30 p.m. ET, covering positions held as of the preceding Tuesday. It breaks down open interest in each futures market by trader category: commercials (businesses hedging real exposure), non-commercials (large speculators such as funds) and non-reportables (small traders below the reporting thresholds).

The data is public and free, but it arrives as dense tables. Reading one week in isolation tells you little — the value comes from charting net positioning over months and years, which is exactly the part the raw release doesn’t give you.

How to read a Commitments of Traders report

For each trader group, subtract short contracts from long contracts to get net positioning. Commercials tend to lean against price because they hedge — a producer sells futures as prices rise. Large speculators tend to lean with the trend, since many are momentum-driven funds. Small traders are the residual.

The readings most analysts watch are extremes: when large-speculator net length in a market reaches a multi-year high or low, positioning is stretched and the crowd is heavily committed to one side. That is sentiment context — a description of how one-sided the market has become — not a prediction. Stretched positioning can persist for a long time before anything changes.

What Meaterm does with COT data

Meaterm ingests each CFTC release and turns it into working research views inside the browser-based terminal:

• Positioning dashboards — net positioning by trader group across markets, in one screen.
• Historical COT charts — years of net positioning plotted against price, per market.
• Per-asset drill-down — open a single market and inspect each group’s longs, shorts and net.
• Extremes flagging — readings at the edge of their historical range are highlighted as context.

COT positioning sits next to advanced charting, FRED-backed macro dashboards, the earnings calendar, on-chain crypto analytics and SEC-filing fundamentals — the full list is on the features page. The point is not COT in isolation; it’s reading positioning alongside the macro and price picture in one place.

COT data for FX, metals, energy and indices

Meaterm’s COT coverage spans the major CFTC-reported futures markets traders actually watch:

• FX — currency futures on the euro, yen, pound, franc, Australian and Canadian dollar, commonly read as a proxy for spot-FX sentiment.
• Metals — gold, silver and copper positioning.
• Energy — crude oil and natural gas.
• Equity indices — index futures such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100.

Cross-asset positioning is where COT gets interesting: speculators stretched long a currency while also stretched in a correlated commodity is a very different backdrop than either reading alone. That cross-asset view inside a single trading terminal is the reason COT is a first-class dataset in Meaterm rather than a bolt-on.

Limitations worth knowing

Honest caveats, because COT data is often oversold:

• It lags — Friday’s release shows Tuesday’s positions, a roughly three-day delay. Fast-moving weeks can look stale by publication.
• It’s futures-only — no spot FX, no OTC derivatives, no cash equities. It is a window into one venue, not the whole market.
• It’s context, not a signal — extremes describe crowding; they don’t time reversals, and Meaterm never presents them as trade recommendations.

Meaterm itself is analysis-only: no brokerage, no trade execution, and market data is delayed or end-of-day rather than real-time tick. If you’re weighing that trade-off against a ~$2,000/month Bloomberg Terminal or TradingView’s ~$15–60/month charting tiers, the side-by-side comparison lays out exactly what you get per euro. These are research tools, not investment advice.

COT report FAQ

This week’s COT positioning

Net positioning of large speculators — leveraged funds in financial futures, managed money in commodities — from the latest Commitments of Traders release. Figures are futures contracts, net long minus short, with the week-over-week change. This is sentiment context, not a signal, and not investment advice.

CFTC data as of July 21, 2026. The report is published weekly, normally on Friday, and reflects positions held as of that Tuesday. Source: CFTC Commitments of Traders.