Every Tuesday, some of the largest participants in the currency futures market — banks, asset managers, hedge funds and other big traders — have their positions tallied by the CFTC and published for anyone to read. If you trade forex, you will eventually run into this data under its official name, the Commitments of Traders report, or COT. It is free, weekly, and genuinely official: it comes from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the futures regulator, not from a vendor selling indicators.

This article explains what the report actually contains, why it is always a few days behind the market, how to read the currency numbers without misreading them, and where it stops being useful — because the COT report describes exchange-traded futures positions, not the spot and OTC (over-the-counter) FX market where most retail forex trading happens.

What the CFTC publishes

The Commitments of Traders reports break down open interest in futures markets where 20 or more traders hold positions at or above reporting levels set by CFTC rules. "Open interest" is the total number of futures contracts that have been entered into and not yet offset — it is a count of open positions, not trading volume, and the long side always equals the short side.

The CFTC publishes several variants:

• Futures-only report and a futures-and-options-combined report. In the combined report, option positions are converted to futures-equivalents using delta factors supplied by the exchanges. The two can differ, so always note which one a chart is based on.

• Short and long formats. The short report shows open interest by reportable and nonreportable positions, plus positions by trader category, changes from the previous report, percentages of open interest, and the number of traders. The long report adds concentration ratios (how much open interest the largest four and eight traders hold).

• Legacy and Disaggregated reports. The legacy report splits reportable traders into "commercial" and "non-commercial." The Disaggregated COT — the version used in this article — separates reportable traders into four categories: dealer/intermediary, asset manager/institutional, leveraged funds, and other reportables. (The CFTC also publishes other report variants that slice financial markets differently; for currency contracts the Disaggregated report is the one most worth learning first.)

For currency traders the relevant markets sit in the financial futures dataset: CME futures on euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, Canadian and Australian dollars, and the associated cross-rate contracts.

The release cycle: Tuesday data, Friday report

The schedule is fixed and worth internalizing, because it drives how the data should be used. Each report is released at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, and the release usually includes data "as of" the previous Tuesday. In other words, the numbers you read on Friday evening already describe positions held three days earlier — and by the time you act on them, another weekend and Monday have passed. The 2026 schedule shows typical holiday delays: the November 2026 releases fall on 06, 16*, 20 and 30*, with asterisks marking delayed release dates.

Two historical details explain why the report is what it is. COT data have been published in some form since 1924, weekly since 2000, and current and historical data are freely available on CFTC.gov (futures-only history goes back to 1986). In 2022 the CFTC also moved the data into a public reporting environment where you can search and filter directly, with CSV downloads.

Who is who in the Disaggregated COT

Each week, reporting firms (clearing members, futures commission merchants and foreign brokers) report the positions of traders above the reporting levels. The Explanatory Notes state that these reported positions usually represent 70 to 90 percent of total open interest. Everything below the reporting level is lumped into "nonreportable positions" — derived by subtraction, with no visibility into who those traders are or how they would be classified.

The Disaggregated COT then classifies the reportable traders by their predominant business activity:

Classification is based on what the trader tells the CFTC it does (via Form 40) plus staff review — the CFTC classifies traders, not individual trades. A trader can be commercial in one market and non-commercial in another. And for confidentiality, where a category has fewer than four active traders in a market, positions are still reported but the trader count is suppressed.

Reading the euro numbers: a real week, worked through

Here is one recent week of real CFTC data, parsed directly from the Commission's own historical dataset for CME EURO FX futures. The figures are as of Tuesday, October 20, 2026 (released Friday, October 30, 2026). This is reported data, not a broker observation or a forecast.

Total open interest was 868,188 contracts, and 353 reportable traders were active. The arithmetic is simple: net position = long − short. Leveraged funds were net short 71,574 contracts, equal to about 8.2 percent of open interest on a net basis; asset managers were net long 173,249, or about 19.9 percent of open interest on a net basis. Reported longs alone covered roughly 90 percent of open interest, consistent with the CFTC's 70–90 percent description.

One week means little by itself. Across 2026 so far, the same leveraged-funds net position in this contract swung from about +50,600 contracts in the first January report to −71,574 by late October — a swing of more than 120,000 contracts over the year. That is the level of context a single reading needs: what is unusual is not that leveraged funds were net short in October, it is how far the figure sits from its own recent range.

Worked arithmetic for the table above (computed with Python, not by hand): leveraged funds −71,574 / 868,188 = −8.2% of open interest; asset managers +173,249 / 868,188 = +19.9%. Figures are per-contract counts as published by the CFTC; no adjustments, rounding beyond one decimal, or cross-contract aggregation were applied.

What COT can and cannot tell a spot forex trader

This is where most mistakes happen. The report is honest and official, but it measures a different market than the one retail traders access.

• Futures, not spot. The COT counts positions on exchange-traded futures. Most global FX trading happens in the decentralized OTC market — BIS survey data put OTC FX turnover at $7.5 trillion per day in April 2022, with spot at 28% of it. A corporation hedging a receivable, a fund running an FX overlay, and a market maker warehousing client flow may appear in futures data only partially, or not at all. EUR/USD futures are one large proxy for euro-dollar positioning, not the whole euro-dollar market.

• The lag is structural. A Tuesday snapshot released Friday cannot show a market reaction to Thursday's rate decision. Treat COT as slowly evolving context, not as a reaction tool.

• Categories are business types, not opinions. "Dealer" is not a directional bet by banks, and "leveraged funds" is not a single smart crowd. Each category aggregates hundreds of traders (353 in the euro example) with offsetting motives — hedgers, systematizers, discretionary desks.

• Open interest is not volume. A stable net position with high turnover tells a very different story from one built in a week, and the report cannot distinguish them.

• Changes can come from many directions. A rise in a category's net long position can mean new buying, closing of shorts, or both. Without the gross long and short columns, net figures alone under-describe what happened.

Common misreads worth avoiding

• Treating extremes as signals. A net position near its multi-year extreme says positioning is crowded, not that price must reverse. Crowded positioning can persist; stops can extend trends before breaking them.

• "Commercials are always right." In the disaggregated view, hedging entities often hold positions that offset real-world exposures; their futures position may be the natural opposite side of a business need, not a market view.

• Reading one week as a trend. The euro example above — a five-figure week-over-week move in leveraged funds' net position — shows how noisy single readings are. Week-over-week deltas are inputs to a longer record, not standalone signals.

• Mixing report variants. Futures-only and combined reports, legacy and disaggregated category names, and different contracts (including the cross-rate contracts) are not interchangeable. Build any comparison from one consistent series.

A practical routine

If you want the report in your process without the folklore:

1. Pick one contract per currency (for EUR/USD, the CME EURO FX futures) and stick with it, futures-only or futures-and-options-combined — not a mixture.

2. Look at the latest week's category longs, shorts and nets, and the week-over-week change the report itself publishes.

3. Compare the net position to its own history — where it sits relative to the past year or more is more informative than any single number.

4. Note the as-of date every time. If you are reading it on Friday, the data is from Tuesday.

5. Treat the output as context about who holds what, at the margin, three-plus days ago — and weigh it alongside everything else you already use for risk management, position sizing and trade review.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the COT report free?

Yes. The CFTC publishes current and historical COT data on CFTC.gov at no charge, including downloadable historical files and a searchable public reporting environment with CSV export.

Does the COT report cover spot forex?

No. It covers exchange-traded futures (and, in the combined report, futures-equivalent options) reported to the CFTC. The spot and OTC foreign exchange market is not included, which is why futures positioning is a proxy rather than a complete picture of currency positioning.

What is the difference between the legacy and Disaggregated COT?

The legacy report splits reportable traders into "commercial" and "non-commercial." The Disaggregated COT breaks the same reportable positions into four categories — dealer/intermediary, asset manager/institutional, leveraged funds, and other reportables — giving a finer view of who holds what.

When is the COT report released?

Every Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, with data as of the previous Tuesday. Federal holidays can delay the release by one or two days.

The practical takeaway

The COT report is one of the few genuinely free, regulator-published windows into large traders' positioning, and the euro futures example above shows how quickly you can read it: pick a contract, subtract short from long, and compare against history. Its limits are just as structural — a three-day-old snapshot of futures positioning in one contract, published in categories that describe businesses, not beliefs. Use it as slowly moving context about positioning extremes and shifts, not as a signal, and your risk decisions remain exactly that: yours.