The Commitment of Traders (COT) reports provide a breakdown of each Tuesday’s open interest, based on the Futures-Only reports, for markets in which 20 or more traders hold positions equal to or above the reporting levels established by the CFTC. Commitment of Traders (COT) charts are updated each Friday at 3:30pm ET. The Commitment of Traders information is available with both the Legacy Report (COT), and the Traders in Financial Futures Report (TFF).
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Legacy Report (COT)
The legacy COT is the one with which traders are most familiar. 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 commercial traders (Institutionals), non-commercial traders (Speculators), and non-reportable positions (Small Traders).
Commercial traders may also refer to asset managers or institutional traders, from investment or commercial banks, dealer or intermediary brokerage firms, mutual and pension funds, or any large financial firm.
Non-commercial traders tend to be speculators from hedge funds, leveraged funds, commodity trading advisors and large banks trading divisions which usually take the opposite side of commercial divisions.
Non-reportable positions are also known as small retail traders.
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Traders in Financial Futures Report (TFF)
The CFTC also publishes the Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) report, to separate Commercials into Dealer/Intermediary and Non-commercials into Leveraged Funds/Other Reportables.
Dealer/Intermediary: These participants are typically described as the “sell side” of the market. They do design and sell financial assets to clients. Futures contracts are part of the pricing and balancing of risk associated with the products they sell and their activities. These include U.S. large banks, intermediary dealers and market makers in securities, futures, options, swaps and other derivatives.
Asset Manager/Institutional: These are institutional investors, usually known as the 'elephants in the room' including the large pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, mutual funds and those portfolio investment managers and investments banks divisions whose clients come predominantly from the institutional side.
Leveraged Funds: These are typically hedge funds and various types of money managers, including registered commodity trading advisors (CTAs) and registered commodity pool operators (CPOs). The strategies may involve taking outright positions or arbitrage. The traders may be engaged in managing and conducting proprietary futures trading from speculative clients.
Other Reportables: The traders in this category mostly are using markets to hedge business risk, whether that risk is related to foreign exchange, equities or interest rates. This category includes corporate treasuries, central banks, smaller banks, mortgage originators, credit unions and any other trading division not assigned to the other categories.