7. Futures, commodities and energy

Who holds the futures (COT)

The CFTC's weekly Commitments of Traders shows how many futures contracts speculators, hedgers and small traders hold long and short, and COT shows it per market with history and percentiles.

4 min
3 questions
Lesson 3 of 7

Why you would care

Who holds the futures, and is the positioning crowded? When speculators are already very long oil, who is left to buy? Extreme positioning often comes before sharp reversals, and desks watch it every Friday afternoon. COT is one of the few free, official windows into who holds what in futures.

The idea from scratch

Large traders must report their futures positions daily to the CFTC (the US futures regulator). Each week it publishes aggregates by trader class:

Class (Legacy report)	Who	Why they trade
Commercial	Producers, refiners, airlines, farmers, merchants	Hedging a real business
Noncommercial	Funds and large speculators	Profit from price moves
Nonreportable	Small traders below the reporting size	Mixed

The Disaggregated report splits further: producers and merchants, swap dealers, managed money (hedge funds and commodity trading advisers), other reportables.

Net position = longs - shorts. Commercials are usually net short (a producer sells future output); speculators usually take the other side.

Timing: positions are as of Tuesday, published Friday afternoon. By the time you read it, three days of trading have happened.

Diagram: Large traders report positions leads to CFTC aggregates by class; CFTC aggregates by class leads to COT report (Tuesday data, Friday release); COT report leads to Net long/short per class; Net long/short per class leads to Percentile vs 1Y and 3Y history.

See it in Gloom

Gloom screenshot: COT CL, Legacy report for WTI crude oil — COT CL, Legacy report for WTI crude oil: front-month price (green) and noncommercial net position (yellow) over three years, then each class's longs, shorts, net, weekly change and percentiles. Historical example.

open ittype COT CL, or COT for the board of all markets (sorted by how unusual their positioning is). Tabs: Legacy, Disaggregated. Back returns to the board.

Front price 92.41, Noncommercial net +141,106: speculators are net long about 141,000 contracts.
Row Noncommercial 360,810 219,704 +141,106 +5,201: their net rose by 5,201 contracts in the latest week.
PCTL 1Y 69, PCTL 3Y 28: fairly high for the past year, low for the past three years.
Row Commercial ... -169,889: hedgers are net short, as usual.
The chart: the speculative net (yellow) fell through 2025 while prices fell, then rose with prices in 2026.

Practice and recap

Try it3 tasks

Which class is net short in the screenshot? (Commercial.)
Why are commercials usually net short in oil? (Producers hedge future output by selling futures.)
Speculators' net long is at the 98th percentile of 3 years. What risk does that suggest? (Crowding: few buyers left; a reversal could be sharp.)

Common mistakes4 mistakes

Treating COT as real-time. It is three days old at release.
Reading commercial positions as a price forecast: they hedge, they do not bet.
Comparing net positions across markets of different sizes; use percentiles.
Confusing futures-only with futures-and-options reports.

Check yourself3 questions

Who publishes the Commitments of Traders?
As of which day are positions measured, and when are they released?
What is a net position?

Answers

The CFTC, the US futures regulator.
Tuesday; released on Friday.
Longs minus shorts for a trader class.

Words in this lesson6 words

CFTC: The US regulator of futures and swaps.
Commitments of Traders (COT): The weekly report of futures positions by trader class.
commercial / noncommercial: Hedgers with a real business / speculators.
managed money: Hedge funds and commodity trading advisers (Disaggregated report).
net position: Longs minus shorts.
crowded positioning: A net position at an extreme of its own history.

Educational material about reading market data, not investment advice.