WTI Crude Oil COT report: managed money positioning
Managed money is net long 31,128 futures contracts in the CFTC’s WTI-PHYSICAL contract. Every figure below comes from the file linked on this page, and the arithmetic that produced it is written out so you can redo it.
Report as of October 27, 2026. Release: Friday, October 30, 2026, 15:30 ET, on the CFTC’s release schedule. That is the CFTC’s schedule, not a recorded release time: the CFTC file carries no release date.
Source: CFTC Commitments of Traders (US government, public domain — redistribution permitted). Read the same week from the CFTC’s own file, one row per market: WTI Crude Oil. The whole file, unfiltered: Disaggregated (futures only) · CFTC release page
Check this number yourself
- Open the CFTC’s own row for this contract and this week: https://publicreporting.cftc.gov/resource/72hh-3qpy.json?$where=contract_market_name%3D'WTI-PHYSICAL'%20AND%20report_date_as_yyyy_mm_dd%3D'2026-10-27'
- Find
m_money_positions_long_allandm_money_positions_short_all. - Subtract the second from the first. That is the net position printed above: 31,128.
- The whole file, unfiltered, is Disaggregated (futures only), published on the CFTC release page. Release: Friday, October 30, 2026, 15:30 ET, on the CFTC’s release schedule. That is the CFTC’s schedule, not a recorded release time: the CFTC file carries no release date.
The last 12 reports
| Report week | Net position | Week over week |
|---|---|---|
| October 27, 2026 | 31,128 | -5,059 |
| October 20, 2026 | 36,187 | -4,387 |
| October 13, 2026 | 40,574 | -13,024 |
| October 6, 2026 | 53,598 | -25,994 |
| September 29, 2026 | 79,592 | -22,236 |
| September 22, 2026 | 101,828 | -4,451 |
| September 15, 2026 | 106,279 | -5,452 |
| September 8, 2026 | 111,731 | +17,450 |
| September 1, 2026 | 94,281 | +10,261 |
| August 25, 2026 | 84,020 | -3,459 |
| August 18, 2026 | 87,479 | +7,563 |
| August 11, 2026 | 79,916 | -7,042 |
The rank and the week count above use the 156 weekly nets ending at October 27, 2026 — the last 12 of them are printed here; the rest are in the same CFTC file.
How this is calculated
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:
- 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. The page marks which side it counted. If no week in the window qualifies, the page says so instead of printing a number. Below 156 observations, where the rank prints an em dash, it prints an em dash too: the side comes from the rank, and the file this page reads does not hold the full window.
Labels. The rank and the sign of the net choose the label. A rank at or above 90 prints “Crowded long” when the net is long and “Net short, near 3-year high” when it is short or zero; a rank at or below 10 prints “Crowded short” when the net is short and “Net long, near 3-year low” when it is long or zero. Everything between prints nothing at all, and so does a rank the em dash replaces.
What this cannot tell you
- Only positions at or above the CFTC’s reporting levels are sorted into categories. Every participant below them appears only in the report’s one non-reportable total, so no category figure here includes them.
- A trader’s category reflects their main business, not the purpose of any one position. A fund classified as Leveraged Funds or Managed Money may be hedging; a producer may be speculating.
- Futures only. Options positions, and any exposure held off US futures exchanges, are not in this file at all — for currencies in particular, the futures book is a fraction of the market.
- This report describes positions held on Tuesday, October 27, 2026. The CFTC’s schedule put its release on Friday, October 30, 2026, three days later, and the positions may already have changed by then.
- A high or low rank says how stretched positioning is against its own recent history. It says nothing about when, whether, or in which direction that unwinds.
Questions about this page
Which CFTC report covers WTI crude oil futures?
The Disaggregated Commitments of Traders report, futures only: options are not included. This page reads the CFTC’s Disaggregated futures-only dataset, 72hh-3qpy on publicreporting.cftc.gov, and in it the row named WTI-PHYSICAL (CFTC contract code 067651), the 1,000-barrel contract of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). Of the rows whose name contains “WTI-PHYSICAL” it takes the one with the largest open interest, leaving out the micro and nano contracts; in the CFTC file there is only one such row. The net position is m_money_positions_long_all minus m_money_positions_short_all on that row; the spreading positions the CFTC reports in a separate column are not in it.
Who counts as managed money in the crude oil figures?
The crude oil figures on this page are for Managed Money, a trader category in the CFTC’s Disaggregated report. The CFTC’s explanatory notes define a money manager as a registered commodity trading advisor (CTA), a registered commodity pool operator (CPO) or an unregistered fund identified by the CFTC, engaged in managing and conducting organized futures trading on behalf of clients. CFTC staff place each reportable trader in the category of its predominant activity, not by the purpose of any one position, so a fund counted here may be hedging.
How current is the crude oil figure?
It describes positions held on the Tuesday of the report week. The CFTC publishes the report that Friday at 15:30 ET, and a US federal holiday moves the release to the following Monday, so the positions are at least three days old when they come out. Meaterm’s copy of the CFTC file refreshes every six hours and this page rebuilds at most once an hour, so a new report can take up to about seven hours after its release to appear here.
COT reports for other markets
- S&P 500 COT report (CME · leveraged funds · Traders in Financial Futures report)
- Nasdaq-100 COT report (CME · leveraged funds · Traders in Financial Futures report)
- Euro FX COT report (CME · leveraged funds · Traders in Financial Futures report)
- Bitcoin (CME) COT report (CME · leveraged funds · Traders in Financial Futures report)
- Gold COT report (COMEX · managed money · Disaggregated report)
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Every market in this week’s report: the weekly COT table. New to the data? Read the COT report: what it is and how to read it.
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