FREE TRADINGVIEW INDICATOR
The crowd’s position, and what it was worth last time.
Plenty of scripts plot Commitments of Traders positioning. This one adds the part nobody else has: when a market goes stretched, it tells you how many comparable extremes actually reversed, and how far the move typically went against you first. Free, open source, no account needed.
cotreport · crowd positioning
97th percentile · CROWD LONG · stretched
31 extremes since 2006 · 15 turned inside 13 weeks (48%)
typical move against you: 4.4% · full file at cotreport.ai
the status box on a gold chart · numbers are this market’s own graded record
WHAT THE NUMBERS MEAN
A stretched reading is a risk state, not a signal. Across 40 markets with enough history to quote, the crowd reversed inside 13 weeks in a median of 42% of cases, and 35 of 40 markets come in under half. Crowding tells you the trade is popular. It does not tell you it is about to end.
That is why the box shows a count and a rate, never a chance. A frequency is a fact about the past. A probability would be a forecast, and our own pre-registered protocol failed the bar we set for that in advance. The whole record →
Any futures chart
It reads the CFTC code from the symbol you are on. Gold, wheat, the euro, ES: if the CFTC publishes it, the indicator finds it.
Its own 3-year range
Net speculative position as a share of open interest, ranked against 156 weeks of its own history, so markets of different sizes compare.
The graded record
Baked in from the same files this site publishes: how many extremes turned, and the typical adverse move. Refreshed when the record grows.
HOW IT WILL WORK
- Open any futures chart on TradingView.
- Indicators → search cotreport (once it is published).
- Add it. The status box appears top-right.
Nothing to install and no sign-up. It will keep working whether or not you ever read this site again.
Where the numbers come from
Positioning comes from TradingView’s own COT data, so the plot works without us. The record does not: it is generated from the graded files on this site, every extreme since 2006, de-clustered, with the outcomes attached. Markets with fewer than ten graded cases show the percentile only, because a rate built on five cases is not a rate.
The indicator gives you the headline. The file behind it gives you the conditions at past turns, the timing, and every case that did not work. A full worked file, free: GOLD →
TAKE THE INDICATOR
It is yours. Paste it into TradingView and it works on any futures chart.
Open TradingView, hit Pine Editor, paste, Add to chart. It reads the CFTC code from whatever symbol you are on and plots how one-sided positioning has become against that market’s own three-year range. No account here needed, nothing to install.
Drop your address and confirm. The download link is in that first e-mail, next to today’s crowd map. The indicator hands you the reading; what it cannot hand you is what the reading was worth, and that is what arrives every Friday after it: which of the 44 markets are worth your week, how far past turns ran against the trade before they worked, and every bet of ours that is losing.
The Friday Letter
Every Friday 21:30 CET the new report lands and we regrade all 1,206 cases overnight. Confirm and your crowd-map snapshot arrives right away. Then every Friday: what moved, where the crowd is stretched, and which fades are running in public. And the moment we open one, you get the ping. Free.
Every Friday: where the crowd is stretched, what is running, what it cost. Free.
Confirmation by e-mail, one-click unsubscribe in every issue. Your address is never shared.
one click to confirm, one to leave · the script is free and stays free
statistics about the past, not advice · not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the CFTC · positioning data is from the CFTC’s public Commitments of Traders reports