The Commitments of Traders (COT) report is published weekly by the CFTC (the US futures market regulator) and breaks down exactly how many futures contracts different categories of traders are holding — long and short — across everything from Gold and Silver to major currency pairs and stock indices. It's free, official, and has been published for decades.
The two groups that matter most
- Non-commercial (large speculators) — hedge funds, CTAs, large individual speculators. This is the group most traders watch, since it reflects directional bets rather than hedging.
- Commercial (hedgers/producers) — companies using futures to hedge real business exposure (a gold miner hedging future production, an exporter hedging currency risk). Their positioning is usually the mirror image of speculators.
How traders actually use it
Extreme net-long or net-short positioning among large speculators is often read as a crowding indicator — when almost everyone is already positioned one way, there are fewer new buyers (or sellers) left to push the move further, and the setup becomes more vulnerable to a sharp reversal if sentiment shifts. It's a weekly, lagging snapshot (data is as of Tuesday, released the following Friday) — not a timing tool on its own, but useful context for how stretched a trend's positioning has become.
Where Quantora fits
Quantora's COT/Positioning section shows the latest non-commercial net position, the long/short split, and the week-over-week change for Gold, Silver, major forex pairs, and indices — sourced directly from the CFTC's public API, updated weekly. It also feeds into the "Why Did It Move?" explainer, which surfaces a positioning shift alongside real Treasury/dollar-index data and the Fed's own statements when a symbol makes an unusual move.