Commitment of Traders Report

The Commitments of Traders (COT) reports can be a very powerful trading tool to help anticipate market direction as it provides a breakdown of each Tuesday’s open interest for market reports in which 20 or more traders hold positions equal to or above the reporting levels established by the CFTC., and it measures the net long and short positions taken by traders in the futures market. Of course, it is very important to know that For reportable positions, additional data is provided for commercial and non-commercial holdings, spreading, changes from the previous report, percents of open interest by category, and numbers of traders

The report is pretty straight forward, but here’s a quick run down of what each category is.
• Non-Commercial – Traders such as individual traders, hedge funds, and financial institutions. who are looking to trade for speculative gains.
• Commercial - These are the big businesses that describes an entity involved in the production, processing, or merchandising of a commodity that uses currency futures to hedge.