CFTC COT Report Scraper — Commitments of Traders Weekly Positions

Extracts weekly Commitments of Traders (COT) reports from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Returns structured rows — long, short, and spread positions by trader category — for over 680,000 historical records across energy, agriculture, metals, FX, and equity-index markets.

Bloomberg charges for this. The CFTC publishes it for free on a Socrata API that nobody made an Apify actor for, until now.

CFTC COT Report Scraper Features

• Extracts all four report variants — Legacy Combined, Legacy Futures Only, Disaggregated Combined, and Traders in Financial Futures (TIFF)
• Returns 30+ fields per row — long, short, spread positions for commercial, non-commercial, and non-reportable traders, plus open interest, trader counts, and top-4 concentration metrics
• Filters by commodity — case-insensitive contains match on commodity_name (e.g. WHEAT, CRUDE OIL, GOLD)
• Filters by date range — pull just last week's data or the full history back to 2006
• Filters by market code — target a specific CFTC contract market code if you know exactly what you're after
• No proxies needed — pure API, no browser, no rate-limit gymnastics required. The CFTC wants you to have this data.
• Coerces numeric types — all position and open interest fields arrive as strings from the Socrata API; this actor returns them as numbers

Who Uses COT Data?

• Commodity traders — track non-commercial positioning to gauge speculative sentiment in crude oil, wheat, gold, and natural gas
• Macro newsletter writers — automate weekly COT updates instead of manually downloading CFTC CSV files every Friday
• Quant researchers — build positioning datasets for backtesting momentum and contrarian strategies across futures markets
• Prop shops — monitor commercial vs. non-commercial positioning divergence as a leading indicator
• FX traders — pull currency futures positioning (EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD) from the TIFF report to track institutional flows
• Data engineers — feed structured COT rows into a warehouse, replacing the unreliable CFTC CSV download workflow

How It Works

1. Select a report type — Legacy Combined covers most commodity and FX futures. Disaggregated splits producers and swap dealers. TIFF covers financial futures and currencies.
2. Set optional filters — commodity name, date range, and market code narrow the results. Leave them blank for everything.
3. The scraper hits the CFTC's public Socrata API, paginates through the results at 1,000 rows per request, and coerces all numeric fields from strings to numbers before saving.
4. Results arrive as structured JSON rows in the Apify dataset. Each row is one market-and-week observation.

CFTC COT Input Configuration

{
  "reportType": "legacy_combined",
  "commodityName": "CRUDE OIL",
  "reportDateFrom": "2024-01-01",
  "reportDateTo": "2025-12-31",
  "maxItems": 100,
  "sp_intended_usage": "Commodity positioning analysis",
  "sp_improvement_suggestions": ""
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
reportType	string	legacy_combined	Report variant: legacy_combined, legacy_futures_only, disaggregated_combined, or financial
commodityName	string	(empty)	Case-insensitive commodity name filter (e.g. WHEAT, GOLD, CRUDE OIL)
marketCode	string	(empty)	CFTC contract market code filter (e.g. 001612)
reportDateFrom	string	(empty)	Start date in YYYY-MM-DD format
reportDateTo	string	(empty)	End date in YYYY-MM-DD format
socrataAppToken	string	(empty)	Optional free Socrata app token for higher rate limits
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum rows to return. 0 = unlimited

Report Type Reference

Value	Coverage
legacy_combined	Legacy Futures + Options Combined — the most-cited weekly report
legacy_futures_only	Legacy Futures Only — excludes options positions
disaggregated_combined	Disaggregated: splits commercial into producers/merchants/swap dealers/managed money
financial	Traders in Financial Futures (TIFF) — financial instruments and currencies

CFTC COT Output Fields

{
  "market_and_exchange_names": "CRUDE OIL, LIGHT SWEET-WTI - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE",
  "report_date": "2025-05-06",
  "report_week": "2025 Report Week 18",
  "contract_market_name": "CRUDE OIL, LIGHT SWEET",
  "cftc_contract_market_code": "067651",
  "cftc_market_code": "NYM",
  "cftc_region_code": "NYC",
  "cftc_commodity_code": "067",
  "commodity_name": "CRUDE OIL",
  "report_type": "legacy_combined",
  "open_interest_all": 1802413,
  "noncomm_positions_long_all": 399214,
  "noncomm_positions_short_all": 241380,
  "noncomm_positions_spread_all": 72881,
  "comm_positions_long_all": 1207844,
  "comm_positions_short_all": 1364788,
  "tot_rept_positions_long_all": 1679939,
  "tot_rept_positions_short_all": 1679048,
  "nonrept_positions_long_all": 122474,
  "nonrept_positions_short_all": 123365,
  "change_in_open_interest_all": -34892,
  "pct_of_oi_noncomm_long_all": 22.1,
  "pct_of_oi_noncomm_short_all": 13.4,
  "pct_of_oi_comm_long_all": 67.0,
  "pct_of_oi_comm_short_all": 75.7,
  "traders_tot_all": 482,
  "traders_noncomm_long_all": 152,
  "traders_noncomm_short_all": 106,
  "traders_comm_long_all": 67,
  "traders_comm_short_all": 78,
  "conc_gross_le_4_tdr_long_all": 10.2,
  "conc_gross_le_4_tdr_short_all": 11.4
}

Field	Type	Description
market_and_exchange_names	string	Full CFTC market and exchange name
report_date	string	Report date (YYYY-MM-DD)
report_week	string	YYYY Report Week WW label
contract_market_name	string	Contract market name
cftc_contract_market_code	string	CFTC contract market code
cftc_market_code	string	CFTC market code
cftc_region_code	string	CFTC region code
cftc_commodity_code	string	CFTC commodity code
commodity_name	string	Commodity name
report_type	string	Report variant identifier
open_interest_all	number	Total open interest
noncomm_positions_long_all	number	Non-commercial long positions
noncomm_positions_short_all	number	Non-commercial short positions
noncomm_positions_spread_all	number	Non-commercial spread positions
comm_positions_long_all	number	Commercial long positions
comm_positions_short_all	number	Commercial short positions
tot_rept_positions_long_all	number	Total reportable long positions
tot_rept_positions_short_all	number	Total reportable short positions
nonrept_positions_long_all	number	Non-reportable long positions
nonrept_positions_short_all	number	Non-reportable short positions
change_in_open_interest_all	number	Week-over-week change in open interest
pct_of_oi_noncomm_long_all	number	Non-commercial long as % of open interest
pct_of_oi_noncomm_short_all	number	Non-commercial short as % of open interest
pct_of_oi_comm_long_all	number	Commercial long as % of open interest
pct_of_oi_comm_short_all	number	Commercial short as % of open interest
traders_tot_all	number	Total reportable traders
traders_noncomm_long_all	number	Non-commercial long traders
traders_noncomm_short_all	number	Non-commercial short traders
traders_comm_long_all	number	Commercial long traders
traders_comm_short_all	number	Commercial short traders
conc_gross_le_4_tdr_long_all	number	Top-4 traders long concentration (%)
conc_gross_le_4_tdr_short_all	number	Top-4 traders short concentration (%)

🔍 FAQ

How do I scrape CFTC COT data with Apify? CFTC COT Report Scraper pulls directly from the CFTC's public Socrata API. Configure a report type, set any filters, and run — results are in the dataset within seconds.

What data can I get from the CFTC Commitments of Traders report? CFTC COT Report Scraper returns long, short, and spread positions broken out by trader category (commercial, non-commercial, non-reportable) plus open interest, week-over-week changes, trader counts, and top-4 concentration percentages. That's essentially everything the CFTC publishes for each market and week.

Does CFTC COT Report Scraper need proxies? No. The CFTC public reporting API is open to anyone with an internet connection. No proxies, no browser, no authentication required.

How far back does the COT data go? The Socrata API covers legacy reports back to 2006, with over 270,000 rows in the Legacy Combined dataset alone.

Can I get currency futures positioning with this actor? Yes. Use reportType: "financial" to pull the Traders in Financial Futures (TIFF) report, which covers EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD, and other currency futures alongside equity index and Treasury markets.

How much does it cost to run? CFTC COT Report Scraper charges $0.10 per run plus $0.001 per row. Pulling the most recent week of legacy data (roughly 300 markets) costs about $0.40 total.

Need More Features?

Need custom fields, additional date granularity, or a combined multi-report run? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use CFTC COT Report Scraper?

• Free data source — the CFTC publishes this weekly; the scraper just makes it programmable without writing your own API client
• Clean output — all numeric fields are coerced from strings to numbers, so your downstream pipeline doesn't have to parse "1802413" into a real number
• No proxies, no browser — pure API call with a 100ms courtesy delay, which is more polite than most things that hit government servers