Commitments of Traders
Historical Special Announcements
July 25, 2008 - Revised Historical Data
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.
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.