The COT report is released more quickly—moving the publication to the 6th business day after the “as of” date (1990) and then to the 3rd business https://www.tradingview.com/ day after the “as of” date (1992). The report includes more information—adding data on the numbers of traders in each category, a crop-year breakout, and concentration ratios (early 1970s) and data on option positions (1995). The report also is more widely available—moving from a subscription-based mailing list to fee-based electronic access (1993) to being freely available on the Commission’s internet website (1995).
Commitment of Traders: What are COT Reports & How to Read them
Open interest is the total of all futures and/or option contracts entered into and not yet offset by a transaction, by delivery, by exercise, etc. The Society of Chief Officers of Trading Standards in Scotland (SCOTSS), is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SC047951). Our members are professional trading standards managers representing every Scottish local authority trading standards service. More than half of Scotland’s local authorities operate approved trader schemes through their Trading Standards services, such as Trusted Trader and Buy with Confidence. They are all displayed on this SCOTSS managed website, allowing consumers to choose between traders in different council schemes via a simple postcode and trade type search. Many local authority areas run approved trader schemes, listing local businesses who have been vetted by Trading Standards and who have made a commitment to treat their customers fairly.
Open interest, as reported to the Commission and as used in the COT report, does not include open futures contracts against which notices of deliveries have been stopped by a trader or issued by the clearing organization of an exchange. As one would expect, the largest positions are held by commercial traders that actually provide a commodity or instrument to the market or have bought a contract to take delivery of it. Thus, as a general rule, more than half the open interest in most of these markets is held by commercial traders.
Gauging market sentiment
The COT report gauges market sentiment, revealing the positioning of various trading groups. This information can be used to assess whether the market leans bullish or bearish, potentially leading to adjustments in trading biases. Number of traders doesn’t matter so much because one trader holding 20,000 contracts is the same as 10,000 traders holding two contracts each. It may give you an idea of how many people are involved, but what is important is how many total contracts are out there for that position. The left side of the first column shows the total open interest, which are the number of open contracts in that futures market. This sample is a page from the December 12, 2006, COT report (short format) showing data for the Chicago Board of Trade’s wheat futures contract.
Commodities Reporting General
- The comparison of the net positions is giving us the first understanding of the overall situation.
- Many speculative traders use the Commitments of Traders report to help them decide whether or not to take a long or short position.
- The Division of Market Oversight has prepared the following responses to questions regarding Commitments of Traders reports (COT Reports) published by the Commission.
- The aggregate of all long open interest is equal to the aggregate of all short open interest.
- These are like minimum requirements for a trader’s holdings to be included in the Commitments of Traders report.
- The CFTC receives the data from the reporting firms on Wednesday morning and then corrects and verifies the data for release by Friday afternoon.
The Commission has neither approved nor disapproved of these FAQs, and they have no legal force or effect, do not alter or amend applicable law, and do not create any new or additional obligations for any person. Ritika Tiwari is a freelance content writer and strategist at Blueberry, specializing in forex, CFDs, stock markets, and cryptocurrencies. She has over 10 years of experience building content for FinTech and SaaS B2B brands. Finally, the last section shows how much of the open interest is controlled by large traders. This is more useful than the statistic above because it shows you if the total open interest is owned by a few traders or a larger population.
What is Commitment of Traders?
Percent of Open Interest – Percents are calculated against the total open interest for the futures-only report and against the total futures-equivalent open interest for the options-and-futures–combined report. Percents less than 0.05 are shown as 0.0, and the percents may not add to exactly 100.0 due to rounding. This trading journal is probably one of the most powerful tools I’ve ever seen, especially in the unique format they provide. Euronext publishes the CoT reports every Wednesday afternoon reflecting positions held on previous Friday at close of trading and submitted to the competent authorities. This is meant to provide a clearer picture of what the people with skin in the game—the users of the actuals—think about the market versus the people with profit motivations or speculators.
Commitments of Traders (CoT) report
Specifically, when the number of reportable Large Traders drops below 20 for a commodity or contract market, it sasol stock no longer appears in the COT report. In such event, once a contract market has again reached 20 or more reportable Large Traders, the contract market will be added again to the COT Reports. Generally, the data in the COT reports is from Tuesday and released Friday. The CFTC receives the data from the reporting firms on Wednesday morning and then corrects and verifies the data for release by Friday afternoon.
The COT Public Reporting Environment (PRE) provides an application programming interface sasol south africa limited (API) to allow users to customize their experience with the COT market report data. The API allows users to search and filter across columns for each of the datasets, including reporting date or week, commodity groups, subgroups, or name, and contract market name. Customized data report results can be downloaded to available formats — CSV, RDF, RSS, TSV, or XML.
Open interest is the total of all futures and/or option contracts entered into and not yet offset by a transaction. The long and short open interest https://www.bidvestbank.co.za/ shown as "Nonreportable Positions" is derived by subtracting total long and short "Reportable Positions" from the total open interest. Accordingly, for "Nonreportable Positions," the number of traders involved and the commercial/non-commercial classification of each trader are unknown.
Disaggregated
It breaks down the open-interest positions of all major contracts that have more than 20 traders. The legacy COT simply shows the market for a commodity broken into long, short, and spread positions for non-commercial traders, commercial traders, and non-reportable positions (small traders). To use the COT report & charts for your own trading, you must analyze the net positioning of the different market participants as well as the long and short extremes on a specific period (36 or 6 months). For deeper insights you can use our free Cot index, which puts the net positions in perspective to the extremes of the period.