About COT Terminal

Every Friday at 3:30pm, the CFTC publishes exactly how the largest traders in every major futures market are positioned. Hedge funds, asset managers, the producers who actually make the stuff. Names withheld, positions disclosed. It's free, it's public, and it has been for decades.

Almost nobody reads it — because reading it means parsing government tables across hundreds of contracts, or paying $40 a month to a terminal that does it for you.

That's a distribution problem, not an information problem.

COT Terminal plots positioning against price for 35 markets, every week, for free. No account, no trial, no good part behind a paywall.

It won't tell you what happens next. Large speculators chase trends and are often most committed at exactly the wrong moment — which is the useful part. Positioning tells you who is already all-in, and how much room is left.

I built this because I was tired of renting it. I still use it every Friday.

Every week the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission publishes how much of each futures market is held long and short by different groups of traders — commercial hedgers, large speculators, asset managers, leveraged funds and small traders. That data is public, but it ships as raw text files. We load it, align it with weekly price bars, and render it as net-position charts, normalised indexes and plain-English signals.

• Positioning: the CFTC's published Commitments of Traders reports — both the Legacy and the Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) breakdowns.
• Price: weekly closes for the corresponding front-month futures contract or index.

Nothing is modelled or estimated. Every number traces back to a published release, and we do not adjust or smooth the source data.

For a second explanation of how the report is structured and how traders use it, see Interactive Brokers' COT Report Explained: A Practical Guide for Traders and Investors.

Positions are surveyed as of the close on Tuesday. The CFTC publishes them the following Friday at 15:30 ET. Our pipeline refreshes shortly after that release, so the site always shows the newest report and every prior week back to 2015. Data is therefore always three days old at best — that is a property of the report itself, not a delay on our side.

• Net position is long contracts minus short contracts for a trader group, optionally expressed as a percentage of open interest so it stays comparable as a market grows.
• COT index rescales the current net position against its own history over a chosen window (6 months, 1 year, or 3 years — the default) to a 0–100 reading. 100 means the most bullish positioning in the window; 0 the most bearish. The 0–100 normalization goes back to Larry Williams' COT work in the 1980s and was developed and popularized by Stephen Briese, author of The Commitments of Traders Bible.
• Disagreement index applies the same 0–100 rescaling to the difference between two trader groups, which shows when the two sides of the market are unusually far apart.
• Divergence and convergence compare the direction of price over recent weeks with the direction of the net position. Price up while positioning falls is a bearish divergence; price down while positioning builds is bullish. Moving together is convergence — a confirmed trend.

The guide walks through each of these in plain English.

COT Terminal is built and maintained by MIORI LABS, LLC, a New York limited liability company — a New York–based physician and systematic options trader, Columbia MBA. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the CFTC or any exchange. Nothing on the site is investment advice. Reach us at miori.labs.llc@gmail.com or through the contact page.