What Is COT? The Commitments of Traders Report
What is COT? It is the Commitments of Traders report, a weekly count by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) of who holds the open positions in American futures markets. Every Friday it tells you how the large traders stood the Tuesday before.
A chart shows you where the price went. The COT report shows you who is holding positions in that market, and on which side.
The CFTC counts futures, not the spot market you trade through a broker. But the euro also trades as a future on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the CFTC has firms report their large clients there every day. It is the same currency, so those futures are the best public view you get of how big money leans on it.
The latest week for every major currency is on COT report for forex, with a page per currency such as the Euro COT report and the Japanese yen COT report.
Who gets counted
Only traders at or above a size threshold are named and sorted into groups. In the major currencies, which the rules list as the yen, pound, Canadian and Australian dollar, Swiss franc, Swedish krona and euro, the line is 400 contracts (17 CFR 15.03). One euro contract is €125,000, so you are counted from about €50 million. The New Zealand dollar is not on that list, and its line is 100 contracts.
Once a trader crosses the line in one contract month, the firm reports its whole position in that market. The CFTC adds up the large traders, subtracts them from the total, and prints the rest as nonreportable. Who holds that rest, and how many of them there are, the report cannot say (CFTC explanatory notes).
That rest is not small. On 21 January 2025 the euro report counted 298 large traders. Of the roughly 609,000 contracts open, some 76,000 longs, about an eighth, belonged to traders the report knows nothing about (CFTC TFF data).
When it comes out
The positions are taken on Tuesday. The CFTC publishes them on Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time, which is evening in Europe (CFTC: About the COT reports). In a week with a federal holiday it usually comes out the Monday after; the CFTC release schedule lists those weeks for the year.
So when you read the report on a Friday evening, the market has had three more days of trading since.
Those three days are not quiet. From 2010 to 2025, the typical move from Tuesday to Friday against the dollar was about 0.6% across the euro, yen, pound, Swiss franc and the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand dollars: under half a percent for the Canadian dollar, about 0.8% for the New Zealand dollar. About three weeks in ten it was more than 1%. In more than four weeks in ten, the currency moved further in those three days than in the whole week the report counts.
Those figures compare the Federal Reserve’s noon rates in New York on every Tuesday with the Friday after it and the Tuesday before it, about 800 weeks per currency (Fed H.10). Friday noon is the last rate before the release.
That lag is why COT suits trades you hold for weeks. For a trade you hold for an hour, it is history.
The report itself is old. Its roots go back to 1924, when the US Department of Agriculture’s Grain Futures Administration published a yearly report on hedging and speculation. It came out monthly from 1962, twice a month from 1990, every two weeks from 1992 and weekly since 2000.
Which version to read for currencies
The CFTC cuts the same positions several ways. The oldest cut, Legacy, splits large traders into commercial and non-commercial. Financial futures, currencies included, also get the Traders in Financial Futures report (TFF), with dealers, asset managers, leveraged funds and other reportables. A market only gets a TFF line once at least 20 traders hold positions above the reporting level (TFF explanatory notes).
Leveraged funds are the group forex traders mostly watch. The CFTC describes them as typically hedge funds and money managers, including commodity trading advisors. Why the Legacy split can send you the wrong way, with a real euro week, is in COT Report Explained.
What you do with it
The first number to take out is net positioning: a group’s longs minus its shorts. That tells you which way the group leans, and on its own not much more.
It gets useful in comparison. Set it against the size of the market through open interest, and against the group’s own past through a percentile or a z-score.
A position at a historical extreme tells you a trade is crowded, and treating that as an entry signal is the usual newcomer mistake. COT Data Reversals shows what an extreme looked like in the yen in 2024.
What the COT pages on this site show
They take the TFF report’s leveraged funds, labelled Leveraged Money, in the futures of eight currencies. For the US dollar that is the ICE US Dollar Index future. Each week they print the longs, the shorts, the net position, its change on the week and its share of open interest.