Glossary
Commitments of Traders
Commitments of Traders are CFTC reports that break down open interest in futures and options by trader group. The Bank Participation variant splits positions between US and non-US commercial banks in every market where five or more banks hold reportable positions, published monthly as roughly 340-row HTML tables on a rolling 25-month window.
What is Commitments of Traders?
Commitments of Traders (COT) is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's weekly breakdown of who holds futures and options open interest -Legacy, Disaggregated, Traders in Financial Futures and supplemental CIT report families, each slicing the same markets by different trader classifications.
Two cataloged records cover the family. The CFTC Commitments of Traders (COT) Reports record documents weekly publications "Fridays at 3:30 pm ET as text files and through the free Socrata-based PRE API", covering roughly 100+ markets per week across four report families with history back to January 15, 1986 for Legacy. The Bank Participation Reports record documents the monthly banking cut: "two HTML report pages per month (futures and options), ~340 rows each", split by US versus non-US banks, retained on a roughly 50-page rolling window.
Both are US government works in the commercial delivery terms, free without registration - which is why position analytics built on them face no licensing friction.
Why does Commitments of Traders matter when choosing a dataset?
Trader-group structure is the analytical content. Raw positioning totals say little; the report families answer different questions - Legacy's commercial/non-commercial split, Disaggregated's producer/swap/money-manager detail, TFF's financial-trader view, Bank Participation's bank-specific concentration. Choosing a vendor product without knowing which family it republishes is buying the wrong lens.
The buyer consequence is retention-window surprise. The Bank Participation pages keep only a rolling 25-month window (roughly 50 pages at any time) on the website, so anyone needing longer bank-position history must archive issues themselves or find an accumulated archive. The weekly COT files, by contrast, span nearly four decades.
Format also shapes integration cost: HTML tables for the monthly bank reports versus text files and a Socrata PRE API for the weekly family.
How do you evaluate Commitments of Traders data in a data source?
Apply these checks:
- Identify which report family is offered. Legacy, Disaggregated, TFF, CIT and Bank Participation answer different questions; the cataloged records separate them deliberately.
- Check history against the window. Weekly Legacy runs from January 15, 1986; the bank reports retain a rolling 25-month web window - confirm archival depth before committing.
- Verify the market-coverage rule. Bank Participation covers markets where five or more banks hold reportable positions - narrower than the weekly family's 100+ markets.
- Confirm publication timing. Fridays 3:30 pm ET weekly, monthly for bank participation - pipelines should schedule around both.
- Exploit the licence. Public-domain US government status permits redistribution; prefer sources adding value beyond paywalled repackaging.
Related terms
US commercial delivery terms license is why both CFTC report families redistribute freely.
Web scraping access is the retrieval mode the monthly HTML bank-report pages imply.
Industries where the catalog applies this term: diversified-capital-markets data and diversified-financial-services data.
Frequently asked questions
How often are CFTC Commitments of Traders released?
The core COT families publish weekly on Fridays at 3:30 pm ET as text files and through a free Socrata-based PRE API, per the cataloged record; the Bank Participation variant is monthly, as two HTML pages (futures and options) of roughly 340 rows each.
Is CFTC positioning data free to redistribute?
Yes. Both cataloged records carry US government public-domain licences - the CFTC states government information at its website is in the commercial delivery terms and may be freely distributed - so no permission or fee applies to redistribution.
Datasets containing this field
Datasets containing Commitments of Traders
6 datasets carry commitments of traders in the catalog. Open one, count the fields, judge for yourself.
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