How to read the CFTC Commitments of Traders report, with gold and oil

Three reports built from one set of data

All three reports are built from the same confidential large-trader data that the CFTC collects daily for market surveillance. What differs is how reportable traders are grouped. Staff assign each trader to a group using its Form 40, the statement large traders file with the Commission, and other information available to it. The CFTC’s TFF notes say that report sorts financial traders by their role in the wider market, “sell side” or “buy side”, not by whether they are buying or selling futures.

Each report exists in a futures-only form and a futures-and-options-combined form, so there are six datasets in the CFTC Public Reporting Environment: Legacy (6dca-aqww futures only, jun7-fc8e combined), Disaggregated (72hh-3qpy and kh3c-gbw2) and TFF (gpe5-46if and yw9f-hn96). A market appears only when 20 or more traders hold positions at or above the CFTC’s reporting levels.

CME Bitcoin futures in the TFF report have their own explainer at /articles/cme-bitcoin-futures-positioning-cftc-tff-report, so this piece uses the commodity side.

• Legacy: every market, with reportable traders split into commercial and non-commercial. A trader is commercial if it uses futures in that commodity for hedging as defined in CFTC regulations.
• Disaggregated: physical commodities (agriculture, energy, metals), split into producer/merchant/processor/user, swap dealers, managed money and other reportables. Managed money means registered commodity trading advisors, commodity pool operators and unregistered funds identified by the CFTC, which includes hedge funds.
• Traders in Financial Futures: currencies, interest rates, equity indices and other financial futures, split into dealer/intermediary, asset manager/institutional, leveraged funds and other reportables.
• Nonreportable: in every version, the positions left over when reportable positions are subtracted from open interest. Nobody classifies these traders or counts them.

Timing, reporting levels and spreading

Positions are taken 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, and that federal holidays may delay a release by a day or two. The 13 October 2026 positions were released on Friday 16 October, and the schedule lists 23 October as the next release.

Clearing members, futures commission merchants and foreign brokers report daily on every trader holding a position at or above the reporting level in any single futures month or option expiry. Once a trader crosses that level, its whole position in the commodity is reported. The CFTC says reportable positions usually make up 70% to 90% of open interest. Both of our markets were above that range on 13 October 2026: reportable traders held 87.2% of gold longs and 95.9% of gold shorts (289 reportable traders), and 95.8% and 97.1% in WTI (307 traders), according to the reports’ own percentage and trader-count columns.

Spreading is the part of a trader’s position that offsets across calendar months, or between futures and options, such as long December and short February. That matched amount goes in the spreading column and only the leftover appears as long or short. Producer/merchants have no spreading column in the Disaggregated report; the Legacy report gives one only to non-commercials. Because a spread counts on both sides, open interest equals all long columns plus all spreading columns. Contract months themselves are covered in /articles/futures-contract-months-rolls-and-roll-dates.

Gold in the Disaggregated report, 13 October 2026

Net position means long minus short, leaving spreading out. Managed money held 124,747 − 17,658 = 107,089 contracts net long. Swap dealers were net short 13,976 − 238,070 = −224,094, and producer/merchants net short 18,386 − 36,823 = −18,437. Other reportables were net long 100,790 and nonreportable traders 34,652.

Every futures contract has a buyer and a seller, so the nets sum to zero: −18,437 − 224,094 + 107,089 + 100,790 + 34,652 = 0. Open interest checks the same way: the long and spreading columns add up to 18,386 + 13,976 + 22,057 + 124,747 + 33,557 + 120,553 + 12,338 + 50,731 = 396,345 contracts, the open interest the CFTC printed.

The dataset gives the contract unit as 100 troy ounces, so the managed-money net long is 107,089 × 100 = 10.7 million ounces. Over the week from 6 October it fell by 3,898 contracts: the report’s change columns show managed-money longs down 2,354 and shorts up 1,544.

Four weeks and a year earlier, gold and WTI crude

The table compares 13 October 2026 with the report four weeks earlier (15 September 2026) and 52 weeks earlier (14 October 2025). In gold, the managed-money net long fell by 133,116 − 107,089 = 26,027 contracts in four weeks, but sat only 1,221 below its level a year earlier. The bigger yearly change was among producer/merchants, whose net short shrank from 61,457 to 18,437, by 43,020. Gold open interest fell by 485,788 − 396,345 = 89,443 contracts over the year, or 18.4%.

WTI moved more. Managed money went from a net short of 18,766 a year earlier to a net long of 40,574, a change of 59,340 contracts. Over the four weeks, though, its net long fell by 65,705 from 106,279. WTI’s contract unit is 1,000 barrels, so 40,574 contracts correspond to about 40.6 million barrels. Managed money in WTI also held 286,687 contracts as spreads, more than its outright longs of 171,973. Those spreads sit outside the net figure entirely.

The same markets in the Legacy report

The Legacy report for 13 October 2026 shows the same positions in two groups, and the mapping can be checked to the contract. In gold, Legacy commercial longs are 54,419, which is producer/merchant longs plus swap-dealer longs plus swap-dealer spreads: 18,386 + 13,976 + 22,057. Commercial shorts are 36,823 + 238,070 + 22,057 = 296,950. Non-commercial longs are managed money plus other reportables, 124,747 + 120,553 = 245,300; shorts are 17,658 + 19,763 = 37,421; spreading is 33,557 + 12,338 = 45,895. So the Legacy commercial net short of 54,419 − 296,950 = −242,531 is the producer and swap-dealer nets added together, and the non-commercial net long of 207,879 is 107,089 + 100,790.

WTI shows why the split matters. Legacy commercials were net short 928,629 − 1,053,964 = −125,335 contracts. The Disaggregated report shows that figure is two opposite positions: producer/merchants net long 353,143 and swap dealers net short 478,478. Non-commercials were net long 344,653 − 244,310 = 100,343, which is managed money’s 40,574 plus other reportables’ 59,769. A reader of the Legacy report alone sees commercials net short in both markets, but in gold most of that short belongs to swap dealers, and in WTI the producers themselves were net long.

What the categories cannot tell you

The CFTC’s Disaggregated notes state the main limit directly: “the staff classifies traders not their trading activity.” A producer/merchant’s position is not necessarily all hedging, some swap dealers also do physical business, and a managed-money position may be one leg of a trade in another market that the report does not show. Each trader is placed by its predominant activity, which involves staff judgment, and classifications can change over time.

The report also does not say why a net figure moved. A smaller net long can come from new shorts, closed longs or contracts expiring, and the weekly change columns show only the total. Positions are three days old when published.

Futures-only and combined figures can differ widely. The combined report adds options converted to futures equivalents using exchange-supplied delta factors. On 13 October 2026, combined open interest was 526,276 in gold and 2,575,891 in WTI, against 396,345 and 1,900,179 futures only. Managed money’s combined net long in WTI was 195,537 − 92,772 = 102,765 contracts, against 40,574 futures only. A quoted COT number means little without the dataset it came from.

How /positioning uses the reports, and how to check

Our /positioning page reads the futures-only Disaggregated report for gold and WTI and the futures-only TFF report for stock-index, euro and bitcoin futures. It shows the net position of two groups per market (managed money and producer/merchants for commodities) with the week’s change and a percentile: the share of the last 157 weekly reports, including the latest, in which the net was at or below this week’s. For gold managed money, 43 of 157 weeks were at or below 107,089, the 27th percentile; for gold producer/merchants, 152 of 157, the 97th. WTI managed money was at the 14th percentile (22 of 157). Over that window, WTI managed money ranged from a net short of 38,154 on 21 October 2025 to a net long of 253,879 on 7 January 2025. Our house note of 20 October uses the same figures. A percentile describes where a position sits in its own history, not what prices do next.

To redo these numbers, open the CFTC Public Reporting Environment, choose Disaggregated futures only (72hh-3qpy), and filter on contract market code 088691 for gold or 067651 for WTI, sorted by report date. For the Legacy view use 6dca-aqww with the same codes. Net positions are the long column minus the short column for each group.