COT Report (Commitments of Traders)
A weekly report showing aggregate futures positions held by different categories of market participants across major U.S. futures contracts.
The Commitments of Traders (COT) report is published every Friday afternoon by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), covering positions as of the previous Tuesday. It breaks down open interest in U.S. futures contracts by category of trader, revealing what commercial hedgers, speculators, and other institutional participants are doing across bonds, equities, gold, crude oil, currencies, and dozens of other markets.
There are three COT report formats. The legacy report splits participants into commercial and non-commercial (speculative) categories. The disaggregated report — used for physical commodities — separates producers, swap dealers, managed money, and other reportables. The Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) report — used for financial instruments like Treasury futures, Eurodollars, and equity index futures — separates dealers, asset managers, leveraged funds, and other reportables. For most macro-trading applications, the disaggregated and TFF reports are more useful than the legacy report because they isolate managed money and leveraged funds — the categories most correlated with directional speculation.
BullrunData exposes structured positioning data via /api/v1/institutional/cftc/positioning with smart-money breakdown and week-over-week position changes.