What the CFTC’s weekly report shows about CME bitcoin futures

The four TFF trader groups

The CFTC’s explanatory notes for the TFF report sort large traders by their role in the wider market rather than by whether they are buying or selling futures. Dealers sit on the “sell side”; the other three groups are the “buy side”, the clients of those dealers. CFTC staff assign each reportable trader to one group based on its predominant business, using the Form 40 that large traders file and other information available to the Commission.

One limitation is spelled out in the notes themselves: “staff classifies traders, not their trading activity.” A hedge fund sits in leveraged funds whether a given position is a directional bet or a hedge of something it holds elsewhere. The report cannot tell those apart.

• Dealer/Intermediary: large banks and dealers in securities, swaps and other derivatives that design and sell financial products to clients and tend to run matched books.
• Asset Manager/Institutional: pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, mutual funds and portfolio managers whose clients are mainly institutional.
• Leveraged Funds: typically hedge funds and other money managers, including registered commodity trading advisors and commodity pool operators; their strategies may be outright positions or arbitrage within and across markets.
• Other Reportables: reportable traders that fit none of the first three groups, which the CFTC says mostly use futures to hedge business risk.
• Nonreportable: everyone below the reporting levels. This is not a classified group; the CFTC derives it by subtracting reportable positions from total open interest.

Reportable, spreading and the weekly timing

Clearing members, futures commission merchants and foreign brokers file daily reports with the CFTC. Once a trader holds a position at or above the Commission’s reporting level in any single contract month, that trader’s entire position in the market is reported. The CFTC says reportable positions usually make up 70% to 90% of open interest in a given market. In CME Bitcoin futures on 13 October 2026 the share was higher: 95.3% of long and 96.2% of short open interest was reportable, held by 112 reportable traders, according to the report’s own percentage and trader-count columns.

Each group has long, short and spreading columns. Spreading is the part of a trader’s position that is offset across contract months, for example long November and short December. Only the leftover is counted as outright long or short. Because spreading counts on both sides, total open interest equals the sum of every group’s long and spreading columns, plus nonreportable longs. For 13 October 2026: 6,646 + 414 + 5,079 + 272 + 5,520 + 1,655 + 160 + 24 + 982 = 20,752 contracts, the open interest the CFTC printed.

The positions are measured at the close on Tuesday. The CFTC’s release schedule says the reports are released at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, usually on Friday, with data from the previous Tuesday. The 13 October 2026 positions were released on Friday 16 October; the schedule lists 23 October as the next release. By the time readers see the numbers they are three days old, and the report says nothing about positions taken since.

CME Bitcoin futures on 13 October 2026

Net position here means long minus short, ignoring spreading. On 13 October 2026, leveraged funds were net short 5,520 − 11,364 = −5,844 contracts. Their shorts alone were 54.8% of open interest. Asset managers were net long 5,079 − 1,437 = 3,642 contracts, and dealers net long 6,646 − 4,805 = 1,841. Other reportables were net long 160 and nonreportable traders net long 982 − 781 = 201.

Because every futures contract has a buyer and a seller, the net positions sum to zero: 1,841 + 3,642 − 5,844 + 160 + 201 = 0. A large net short in one group is always matched by net longs somewhere else in the table.

Over the week from 6 October, leveraged funds’ shorts fell by 1,219 contracts and their net short narrowed from 6,852 to 5,844, a change of 1,008. Open interest fell by 680 contracts.

Four weeks and one year earlier

Against 15 September 2026, four reports earlier, open interest was almost unchanged (20,773 to 20,752, a fall of 21 contracts). Underneath, leveraged funds’ net short narrowed by 510 contracts (from −6,354 to −5,844), asset managers’ net long rose by 882 (from 2,760 to 3,642) and dealers’ net long fell by 1,578 (from 3,419 to 1,841), mainly because dealer shorts rose from 3,168 to 4,805.

The year-on-year change is larger. Against 14 October 2025, open interest fell by 28,503 − 20,752 = 7,751 contracts, or 27.2%. Leveraged funds’ shorts fell from 17,470 to 11,364, down 6,106 (35.0%), and their net short narrowed by 7,587 contracts. Asset managers’ longs fell from 8,651 to 5,079, and their net long dropped by 4,401.

To put the latest leveraged-fund figure in a longer frame, we ranked the 156 weekly reports from 24 October 2023 to 13 October 2026. Leveraged funds were net short in all of them, from 23,197 contracts at the largest to 5,313 at the smallest. The 13 October 2026 net short of 5,844 was smaller than in 154 of the other 155 weeks, which is the 99th percentile shown for this market on our /positioning page. Asset managers’ 3,642 sat above 17 of the other 155 weeks, the 11th percentile.

From contracts to bitcoin

The TFF report counts contracts, not coins. The CFTC dataset gives the contract unit for CME Bitcoin futures as 5 bitcoin, so multiplying by 5 converts the counts. Open interest of 20,752 contracts on 13 October 2026 is 20,752 × 5 = 103,760 bitcoin, and the leveraged-fund net short of 5,844 contracts is 5,844 × 5 = 29,220 bitcoin.

A rough dollar size needs a price from the same day. The front-month CME Bitcoin future (BTC=F) closed at 83,385 on 13 October 2026 (Yahoo Finance daily close). On that price the net short is about 29,220 × 83,385 ≈ $2.44bn, and open interest about 103,760 × 83,385 ≈ $8.65bn. These are approximations: positions are spread across several expiries whose prices differ from the front month’s.

The CME Micro Bitcoin contract has its own line in the same dataset. On 13 October 2026, leveraged funds there held 12,471 long and 26,378 short, a net short of 13,907 contracts, out of open interest of 32,913. We leave Micro positions in contract counts here because we could not read CME’s contract specification page when preparing this piece, and the Micro and standard counts cannot be added together without converting both.

What the report can and cannot say

One reading often discussed for CME Bitcoin futures is that part of leveraged funds’ short position belongs to cash-and-carry basis trades, where a fund holds bitcoin or a spot bitcoin ETF and sells futures against it to earn the gap between the futures and spot price. That is a possible interpretation only. The TFF report shows futures positions on one exchange and nothing about the same traders’ spot holdings, ETF shares or positions on other venues, so it cannot confirm how much of the short is hedged and how much is directional. The CFTC’s own note that it classifies traders, not their activity, points the same way.

The same caution applies to the other groups. An asset manager’s net long may sit alongside other holdings the report does not show, and dealer positions often reflect client business. A change in a net figure can come from new positions, closed positions or contracts expiring, and the weekly change columns do not say which. Perpetual swaps on crypto exchanges, which are outside CFTC reporting, are covered in our piece on funding rates and open interest at /articles/crypto-perpetual-funding-rates-open-interest-and-24-7-atr-sizing.

How to check these numbers

The figures come from the CFTC Public Reporting Environment, Traders in Financial Futures, futures-only dataset (gpe5-46if). Filter on market code 133741 for CME Bitcoin and 133742 for CME Micro Bitcoin, and sort by report date. Long, short and spreading columns are listed for each group, together with open interest, weekly changes, percent of open interest and trader counts. Net positions are long minus short; each net position in this piece can be recomputed from those columns.

Our /positioning page shows the latest net positions for leveraged funds and asset managers in CME Bitcoin futures alongside other financial and commodity futures, with the 3-year percentile we compute from the weekly reports. Prices quoted here are Yahoo Finance daily closes for BTC=F, the front-month CME contract.