The short answer
The Commitments of Traders (COT) report is a weekly breakdown of who holds open positions in US futures markets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission publishes it every Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, and it describes positions as they stood on the previous Tuesday. It covers every market in which 20 or more traders hold positions at or above the CFTC's reporting levels.
Three things make it useful and three things limit it:
- Useful: it is official, it is free, and it separates large traders by what kind of business they run.
- Limited: it is three days old when it arrives, it is weekly, and it labels traders, not trades.
If you searched "cot report simplified," that is the whole idea. The rest of this page is how to read it without overreaching, focused on stock index futures, where the report is least familiar to most guides.
How the data gets collected
Clearing members, futures commission merchants and foreign brokers report large traders to the CFTC every day. A trader becomes reportable once it holds a position at or above the Commission's reporting level in any single futures month or option expiration. From then on, the firm reports that trader's entire position in the commodity, regardless of size, per the CFTC's explanatory notes.
Everyone below the threshold lands in nonreportable positions, which the CFTC derives by subtracting all reportable longs and shorts from total open interest. Nobody knows how many traders sit in that bucket or what kind they are. The CFTC says reportable positions usually account for 70 to 90 percent of total open interest.
The four report families
The CFTC publishes the same underlying data in several cuts. Most confusion online comes from mixing them up.
- Legacy COT. Two trader groups: commercial and non-commercial. A position is commercial if the trader uses futures in that commodity for hedging as defined in CFTC Regulation 1.3. Everyone else reportable is non-commercial. This is the version most gold, oil and currency guides describe.
- Supplemental. Futures and options combined for selected agricultural markets, adding an Index Traders group.
- Disaggregated. Physical commodities only. It splits commercials into producer/merchant/processor/user and swap dealers, and splits non-commercials into managed money and other reportables.
- Traders in Financial Futures (TFF). Financial futures: stock indexes, interest rates and currencies. Four groups, defined below. This is the one that matters for S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures.
Every family comes in two formats. Futures-only counts futures contracts. Futures-and-options combined adds options converted to futures equivalents using exchange-supplied delta factors. Our futures positioning pages use the TFF futures-only report.
The TFF trader categories
The TFF report, introduced on July 22, 2010, sorts large traders into a sell side and a buy side. The CFTC's TFF explanatory notes stress that this division is about a firm's role in the market, not whether it is buying or selling futures.
- Dealer/Intermediary. The sell side: large US and non-US banks and dealers in securities, swaps and other derivatives. They design and sell financial products to clients, tend to run matched books, and use futures to price and balance the risk of what they sell.
- Asset Manager/Institutional. Pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, mutual funds and portfolio managers whose clients are mostly institutional.
- Leveraged Funds. Hedge funds and money managers, including registered commodity trading advisors and commodity pool operators. Their strategies can be outright positions or arbitrage within and across markets.
- Other Reportables. Every reportable trader not in the first three groups, mostly hedging business risk: corporate treasuries, central banks, smaller banks, mortgage originators and credit unions.
TFF is not a finer slicing of the legacy report. A trader in any one TFF group can come from either the legacy commercial or non-commercial side, so the two reports cannot be reconciled line by line.
Reading one week of the report
Each category gets a long, a short and a spreading column, plus trader counts. Spreading is the amount of offsetting long and short futures a trader holds in different calendar months (or offsetting futures and options), and any leftover lands in the long or short column. Net is simply long minus short.
Here is a real week, from the TFF futures-only report for E-mini S&P 500 futures, positions as of Tuesday, October 13, 2026, published Friday, October 16, as shown on the S&P 500 page of our futures positioning tracker:
- Open interest: 1,931,607 contracts.
- Dealer/Intermediary: 200,960 long, 803,318 short, net short 602,358.
- Asset Manager/Institutional: 1,110,384 long, 194,549 short, net long 915,835.
- Leveraged Funds: 121,404 long, 530,130 short, net short 408,726.
- Other Reportables: net short 11,079.
- Nonreportable: net long 106,328.
Two checks are worth making on any week. First, the nets across all five groups sum to zero, because every futures contract has one long and one short. Second, nonreportable longs here are about 13 percent of open interest, so reportable longs are about 87 percent, inside the CFTC's usual 70 to 90 percent band.
Then look at the change, not the level. From October 6 to October 13, asset managers added 9,220 contracts of net long, leveraged funds cut their net short by 6,361, and dealers moved 1,517 further net short. Levels this large are structural. A one-week change of a few thousand contracts on 1.9 million of open interest is small, and it is information about the past Tuesday only.
One practical trap: the E-mini is $50 times the index and the Micro E-mini is $5 times the index. The CFTC reports them as separate contract markets, so never add their contract counts together.
COT dealers are not options dealers
This is the confusion worth avoiding on index futures. The large net short in the Dealer/Intermediary row is easy to read as "dealers are bearish" or as a cousin of options dealer gamma. It is neither.
- What COT dealers are. Banks the CFTC classified as sell side, holding futures. Their futures positions often offset products sold to clients elsewhere, such as swaps or structured notes. The CFTC itself warns that it classifies traders, not their trading activity: a firm's futures leg may be one side of a hedge you cannot see.
- What options dealer positioning is. An estimate of how options market makers are hedged, built from options open interest under an assumed convention about who is long and short. That is what our dealer positioning guide and the gamma exposure explainer describe, and how market makers hedge covers the mechanics.
The two measure different instruments, different participants and different time frames. Dealer gamma is about how hedging flows react to the next move in price. COT dealer futures positioning is about inventory on a past Tuesday. They can agree, conflict or have nothing to do with each other in a given week, and neither works as a trade trigger by itself.
The schedule and the lag
The CFTC posts a tentative release schedule for the year. Releases are usually Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, and federal holidays move some of them by a day or two. On the 2026 schedule, for example, the November 16 and November 30 releases are both marked delayed.
The lag is built in: Tuesday positions, published on the third business day after. By the time the report arrives, three trading sessions have passed that it does not describe. Unusual events stretch it further. Publication paused during the late 2025 federal government shutdown, and the CFTC posted notices on its special announcements page as it worked through the backlog.
This is the same kind of structural delay that applies to exchange short interest data: the number is accurate for its as-of date and silent about everything since.
Limits to keep in mind
- Classification is judgment. CFTC staff place each trader by predominant business, using Form 40 filings and other information, and classifications change as firms change.
- Labels are not intent. A leveraged fund may be hedging, and a dealer short may be one leg of a client trade.
- TFF history is backcast. TFF data reaches back to June 13, 2006, but the CFTC did not keep historical classifications, so older weeks use recent labels. The CFTC says the older the week, the less reliable those labels are.
- Small categories are partly hidden. When a category has fewer than four traders, positions are shown but the trader count is suppressed.
- Weekly resolution. Nothing intraday, and nothing between Tuesdays.
Used for what it is, the COT report is a clean, official record of how large participants were positioned in index futures each week, and a useful backdrop next to the options-based measures on the rest of SquawkFlow.
Sources
- CFTC, About the COT Reports: schedule, 20-trader threshold, history.
- CFTC, COT Explanatory Notes: reportable levels, nonreportable positions, legacy categories.
- CFTC, Traders in Financial Futures Explanatory Notes: TFF categories, spreading, backcasting.
- CFTC, 2026 Release Schedule.
- Weekly figures: CFTC TFF futures-only report via the CFTC public reporting environment, as shown on our futures positioning pages.
Educational content, not financial advice. See our risk disclosure.