Every Friday at 15:30 ET the CFTC publishes who holds what in US futures: the Commitments of Traders report. It is a positioning x-ray of every major market, it is free, and most people read it wrong or not at all.
What is actually in it
For every market the report splits open interest into a few camps: large speculators (funds chasing price), commercials (producers and users hedging their business), and small traders. Each camp has a long side and a short side, reported in contracts.
The one number worth scoring
Raw contract counts mean nothing across markets: 50,000 contracts is huge in cocoa and noise in the S&P. So we score one thing: the speculators’ net position as a share of open interest, measured against that market’s own last three years. That gives every market a percentile from 0 to 100. At the 99th, the crowd has almost never leaned harder. That is what our weekly board shows for all 44 markets.
The three classic mistakes
- Reading levels instead of extremes: a big net position that is normal for that market says nothing.
- Treating an extreme as a sell signal: crowded is a risk state, not a countdown. See the receipts.
- Copying commercials blindly: they hedge, so they are structurally on the other side. Their position is a mirror, not an opinion.
Next: who the camps actually are, and why we score percentiles, not levels.