Weekly COT report

Net position is long minus short, in futures contracts, for the largest speculator group the CFTC reports in that market. Futures only; options are not included. Those are two named columns of the CFTC row linked above:

• Leveraged Funds in the Traders in Financial Futures file: lev_money_positions_long − lev_money_positions_short
• Managed Money in the Disaggregated file: m_money_positions_long_all − m_money_positions_short_all

Week over week is this week’s net minus the previous report’s net for the same contract.

The 156-week rank is a plain empirical rank, not a z-score and not a fitted distribution: take the 156 weekly nets ending at this report (156 weeks is three years), count how many are below this week’s, divide by 156, round. A rank of 90 means 90% of those weeks sat below this one. Below 156 observations the column prints an em dash and no label is derived from it.

Weeks since positioning was last this extreme is counted from the same 156 nets. When the rank is 50 or above it is the number of weeks back to the most recent earlier week whose net was greater than or equal to this week’s; below 50 it is the most recent week whose net was less than or equal. If no week in the window qualifies, the page says so instead of printing a number.

Labels. A rank at or above 90 prints “Crowded long”, at or below 10 prints “Crowded short”, and everything between prints nothing at all.