What is the COT report?

The Commitments of Traders report is a weekly CFTC release showing how many long and short futures contracts each category of large trader held as of the previous Tuesday. It is published every Friday afternoon.

What is a net position in the COT report?

Net position is a trader group's long contracts minus its short contracts. A positive net means the group leans bullish; the direction of change week to week matters more than the raw number.

How do you read the COT index?

The COT index rescales a group's net position to 0-100 against its own highest and lowest reading over a lookback window. Above 80 means close to the most bullish that group has been; below 20 means close to the most bearish.

What is the gap index?

The gap is one trader group's net position minus another's, for example leveraged funds minus asset managers. The gap index rescales that difference 0-100 against its own history, so extremes mark the sharpest disagreement between the two sides.

What is a bullish divergence in the COT report?

A bullish divergence is price falling or going flat while the informed trader group keeps adding to its net long position. Someone is accumulating into weakness, which historically shows up near bottoms.

What does convergence mean?

Convergence is price and positioning moving the same way, both up or both down. It signals a trend with real sponsorship behind it rather than a warning.

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The COT report, in plain English

Everything this dashboard shows comes from one weekly government report. This page explains what is in it, what each number on the site means, and how traders actually use it. No prior futures knowledge assumed.

What the COT report actually is

Every Friday afternoon, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) publishes the Commitments of Traders report. It is a headcount of bets: for each futures market — the S&P 500, gold, crude oil, the euro, corn, bitcoin and dozens more — it says how many contracts each type of large trader was holding as of the previous Tuesday.

That is the whole idea. Price tells you what a market did. The COT report tells you who was on each side while it did it.

It only covers traders large enough to be reportable, and it is always three days stale by the time you read it. That lag is the price of getting a genuine look inside the market rather than guessing at sentiment.

Who the trader groups are

The report splits traders by what they are trying to do. The groups you see here are the ones that matter for reading a market:

Commercials (hedgers): Businesses that actually handle the underlying thing — a miner selling gold forward, an airline locking in fuel. They are not trying to predict price, they are trying to remove risk. They usually lean against the trend, so they are heavily short near highs and less short near lows.
Large speculators / managed money: Hedge funds and professional traders betting on direction. They tend to be trend followers: most bullish at the top, most bearish at the bottom. That makes their extremes useful as a contrarian warning.
Leveraged funds: In financial futures (stock indices, rates, currencies) this is the fast money — the group whose swings usually lead short-term moves.
Asset managers: Pension funds, insurers, big institutions. Slow, long-horizon money. When they move, they move for months, not days.
Small traders (non-reportable): Everyone too small to report individually. Traditionally treated as the least informed group, though this is a rough rule of thumb, not a law.

Net position: the number everything is built on

Net position is just long contracts minus short contracts for one group. If leveraged funds hold 300,000 longs and 380,000 shorts, their net is -80,000 — they are leaning bearish.

The raw number is hard to judge on its own. Is -80,000 a lot? It depends entirely on the market and on what that group normally does. Two things are more useful: which direction the net is moving, and how the current level compares with its own history. The COT index below handles the second one for you.

The COT index (0-100)

The COT index takes a group's net position and rescales it against its own highest and lowest reading over a chosen lookback window — six months, one year, or three years.

Worked example: over the past year a group's net ranged from -50,000 at its most bearish to +100,000 at its most bullish. Today it sits at +25,000. That is halfway up the range, so the COT index reads 50.

Above 80 means this group is close to the most bullish it has been in that window. Below 20 means close to the most bearish. Those are the readings worth paying attention to, because crowded positions eventually have to be unwound — and the unwind is what moves price.

One warning: extremes can persist. A reading of 95 does not mean the top is tomorrow. It means the fuel for further buying from that group is running low.

The gap index (0-100)

The gap is the difference between two groups' net positions — for example leveraged funds minus asset managers, or large speculators minus commercials.

A wide gap means the two sides fundamentally disagree about where price is going. Since one of them is eventually wrong, wide gaps mark points of tension in a market.

The gap index rescales that difference to 0-100 against its own history, exactly the way the COT index does. Near 100 or near 0 means the disagreement is as sharp as it has been in the lookback window; the middle means the groups are roughly in line.

Divergence vs convergence

This is where the report earns its keep. You compare the direction of price with the direction of the informed group's positioning over the same stretch of weeks.

Bearish divergence: Price keeps making new highs while the group's net position falls. The rally is being carried by someone other than the money that usually gets it right. Historically this shows up near tops.
Bullish divergence: Price falls or goes nowhere while the group's net position rises. Someone is accumulating into the weakness. This shows up near bottoms.
Convergence: Price and positioning move the same way — both up, or both down. This is a healthy market: the trend has real sponsorship behind it. Convergence is a reason to stay with a trend, not to fight it.
No signal: Neither pattern is clear enough to call. Most weeks in most markets look like this, and that is fine.

How to actually use this

Treat the COT report as context, not as a trigger. It answers 'is this trend well supported or running on fumes?' — it does not answer 'should I buy on Monday?'

A sensible workflow: start on the overview to see which markets are flagging divergences. Open a market, check whether the COT index is at an extreme, look at whether the gap between the two main groups is unusually wide, then look at the chart to see whether price is confirming or contradicting the positioning.

Then use the signal log to see how that market has behaved after similar setups in the past. Some markets — gold, crude, the currencies — respect positioning extremes closely. Others barely react. The log is how you tell them apart.

Finally, wait for price to agree. The strongest setups are a positioning extreme plus a divergence plus an actual turn in price. Positioning alone has kept plenty of traders short a market that kept going up.

Limits and cautions

The data is three days old when it is published, and the CFTC occasionally revises it. Contract specifications and sizes change over time, which can create jumps in long histories.

The report only covers futures traders. Plenty of money moves the same markets through cash, ETFs and options without appearing here — so it is a partial, not complete, picture of sentiment.

Group labels are broad. Not every 'commercial' is a hedger, and not every hedge fund shows up as managed money.

Nothing on this site is investment advice. It is a way of reading a public data set.

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