Commitments of Traders
Commitments of Traders
The Commitments of Traders (COT) reports provide a breakdown of each Tuesday’s open interest for market reports in which 20 or more traders hold positions equal to or above the reporting levels established by the CFTC.
Reports are available in both a short and long format. The short report shows open interest separately by reportable and nonreportable positions. For reportable positions, additional data is provided for commercial and non-commercial holdings, spreading, changes from the previous report, percents of open interest by category, and numbers of traders.
The long report, in addition to the information in the short report, groups the data by crop year, where appropriate, and shows the concentration of positions held by the largest four and eight traders.
Supplemental reports show aggregate futures and option positions of Noncommercial, Commercial, and Index Traders in 12 selected agricultural commodities.
Revised Historical Data is Now Available – July 25, 2008
As indicated in last Friday’s Special Announcement (July 18, 2008), the Commission has now revised Commitments reports for markets affected by reclassified positions, for reports as of July 3, 2007, to date. Today we are releasing the revised data, so that the historical Compressed Reports (in text and EXCEL formats) found on our website now reflect the improved data. We continue to work on revising each individual week’s historical report in viewable (html) format. As a result, we have removed the NYMEX weekly reports (for July 3, 2007, through July 8, 2008) in html format; and, after we have made the adjustments to the html reports, we will repost those individual reports.
Special Announcement – July 18, 2008
Effective with this week’s Commitments of Traders (COT) report, the Commission staff has reclassified certain positions in the energy futures and options markets from the Commercial category to the Noncommercial category. As described in the Backgrounder for the COT report, reportable traders provide information to the Commission, on a market-by-market basis, on whether they use a market for commercial purposes, i.e., use a market for hedging or risk-management. This information is normally the basis used for determining a trader's classification as a commercial trader in the COT report. However, Commission staff periodically evaluate these classifications and will change a classification in light of new or additional information. In this instance, information provided as part of a Commission Special Call to select market participants improved the Commission’s knowledge of certain business operations, resulting in the reclassification of certain positions because commercial hedging or risk management activities did not constitute a significant part of the overall trading activity.
In the interest of transparency and for the purpose of identifying the impact of these changes, as the COT report is released today, we will also publish additional tables that show data for this week’s COT reports for energy markets, that reflect how they would have looked had these updated classifications not been made. Those tables are accessible through these links: Futures Only; Futures and Options Combined. The CFTC also intends to publish revised historical COT data for these markets next week.
Current Reports: Week of September 12, 2008
Futures Only |
Futures-and-Options-Combined | |||
Chicago Board of Trade |
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Chicago Mercantile Exchange |
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Chicago Board Options Exchange |
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Chicago Climate Futures Exchange |
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Kansas City Board of Trade |
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Minneapolis Grain Exchange |
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Commodity Exchange Incorporated |
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ICE Futures U.S. |
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New York Mercantile Exchange |
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Supplemental Commodity Index |
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Other Available Formats
These text-only files contain the most recent Futures-only and Futures-and-Options-Combined long form data in a comma delimited format for easy loading into a spreadsheet.
- Futures-Only Commitments of Traders Comma Delimited
- Options and Futures Commitments of Traders Comma Delimited
- Supplement: Commodity Index Report Comma Delimited
Supplemental Report
In a December 5, 2006 press release, the CFTC announced that, in addition to the existing weekly Commitments of Traders reports, a supplemental report would be published beginning January 5, 2007.
The Commission’s actions in response to its comprehensive review of the Commitments of Traders Reporting program are summarized in Comprehensive Review of the Commitments of Traders Reporting Program published December 5, 2006. An Executive Summary of the December 5, 2006 report is also available.
Send comments to marketreports@cftc.gov.