The COT report is a cast list. Read it wrong and every conclusion that follows is wrong too.
Managed money · the crowd
Funds, CTAs, momentum machines. They chase price, they crowd into winners, and they are the side that panics. When we say “the crowd is long the 97th percentile”, this is who we mean. It is the group our signal files score.
Commercials · the mirror
Producers and processors hedging real business: the farmer selling wheat forward, the airline buying fuel. When specs pile in long, commercials are short almost by construction, because someone has to take the other side. That is why “commercials are record short!” headlines are usually just the specs’ record long, reflected. We publish the commercials’ percentile as context, never as a signal.
Small traders
Everyone too small to report. Late to trends, useful mostly as a crowd-behaviour thermometer at extremes.
One honest nuance: some markets have no meaningful managed-money series, so we fall back to the legacy “non-commercial” group there and say so on the page. Continue with percentiles, explained.