CFTC Commitment of Traders Tracker

Every Friday, the CFTC publishes the weekly positioning of every commercial, speculator, and retail trader in every major US futures market — from crude oil and gold to S&P 500 e-minis, Treasury bonds, bitcoin micro futures, and wheat. This actor pulls that data structured, with week-over-week deltas and signal classification, from the free CFTC API.

What you actually get

Real gold futures positioning extracted on April 7, 2026:

Market	Open Interest	Speculator Net	Commercial Net	WoW Δ	Signal
GOLD - COMMODITY EXCHANGE	550,487	+153,868	-192,465	-6,828	SPEC_LEANING_SHORT
MICRO GOLD	57,230	-13,177	+6,107	-86	SPEC_LEANING_SHORT

Each row includes:

• Report date, report week, market name, commodity code
• Open interest (total contracts)
• Non-commercial (speculator / hedge fund) long, short, spread, and NET positions
• Commercial (producer / hedger) long, short, and NET positions
• Non-reportable (small retail) long, short, NET positions
• Week-over-week changes for each category
• Number of traders in each category
• Computed signal classification: SPEC_BUILDING_LONGS, SPEC_UNWINDING_LONGS, SPEC_LEANING_LONG, SPEC_LEANING_SHORT, NEUTRAL

Why COT data is one of the highest-ROI datasets in finance

COT has been published weekly since 1962. Every macro / commodities trading desk tracks it. When speculators go to extreme net-long, that often marks a top. When commercial hedgers flip to net-long, that often marks a bottom.

Famous COT trades:

• Gold 2011 top: speculator net long peaked at +300k contracts → 5-year bear market
• Oil 2020 bottom: commercial hedgers flipped to net long → 300% rally over 2 years
• S&P 2022 bottom: speculator net short reached extreme → 25% rally

Commercial products:

• Bloomberg Terminal COT function: $25k/yr
• TradingView Premium: $59.95/mo
• Barchart COT Network: $40-400/month
• CoT Base: $20-50/month
• MrTopStep: paid subscription

This actor delivers the same data (same source, same CFTC API) via pay-per-event pricing.

Who this is for

• Commodities traders — gold, silver, copper, oil, nat gas, agricultural futures
• Macro funds — equity index futures, Treasury futures, currency positioning
• FX traders — EUR, JPY, GBP, AUD futures as FX sentiment proxies
• Gold bugs — weekly tracking of hedge fund gold positioning
• Crypto traders — CFTC covers bitcoin micro + ether futures since 2021
• Farmers / food industry — grain, livestock futures positioning
• Quant researchers — COT-based alpha factors are published in multiple academic papers

How to use

1. Click Try for free (or Start)
2. Set markets as substring matches (e.g. ["GOLD", "WTI", "S&P 500", "BITCOIN"])
3. Set sinceDate to control lookback (empty = 90 days)
4. Set maxReports (default 100 rows)
5. Leave computeDeltas: true to get WoW deltas and signal classifications
6. Click Start

Common market substring keywords

Keyword	What it matches
GOLD	Gold futures (full-size + micro)
SILVER	Silver futures
WTI	West Texas Intermediate crude oil
BRENT	Brent crude oil
NATURAL GAS	Natural gas futures
S&P 500	S&P 500 E-mini and micro E-mini
NASDAQ	Nasdaq-100 E-mini and micro
RUSSELL 2000	Russell 2000 mini
DOW	Dow e-mini
ULTRA T-BOND	Ultra Treasury bond
10-YEAR	10-year Treasury note futures
EURO FX	EUR/USD futures
JAPANESE YEN	JPY/USD futures
BRITISH POUND	GBP/USD futures
BITCOIN	Bitcoin futures (and micro bitcoin)
ETHER	Ether futures
WHEAT	Wheat futures (multiple varieties)
CORN	Corn futures
SOYBEAN	Soybean futures
LIVE CATTLE	Live cattle futures
COFFEE	Coffee futures

Output

{
    "reportDate": "2026-04-07",
    "reportWeek": "26-14",
    "marketName": "GOLD - COMMODITY EXCHANGE INC.",
    "commodityName": "GOLD",
    "openInterestAll": 550487,
    "noncommLongAll": 232500,
    "noncommShortAll": 78632,
    "noncommSpreadAll": 45230,
    "noncommNetAll": 153868,
    "commLongAll": 120050,
    "commShortAll": 312515,
    "commNetAll": -192465,
    "nonrepLongAll": 45280,
    "nonrepShortAll": 36450,
    "nonrepNetAll": 8830,
    "changeInOpenInterest": -8490,
    "changeNoncommLong": -4120,
    "changeNoncommShort": 2708,
    "tradersTotalAll": 295,
    "weekOverWeekDelta": -6828,
    "signal": "SPEC_LEANING_SHORT",
    "extractedAt": "2026-04-16T01:35:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

• Actor start: $0.05 per run
• Per report row: $0.003 per market-week row

Example costs:

• Weekly pull of gold + oil + S&P 500 COT data (3 markets × 4 weeks = 12 rows) → $0.09
• 6 months of all major markets (20 markets × 26 weeks = 520 rows) → $1.61
• Full CFTC COT historical pull (2015-present, ~10,000 rows) → $30

For comparison: TradingView Premium $59.95/month, Barchart COT Network $40-400/month.

Tips

• Schedule weekly runs every Friday at 4pm ET to catch the fresh CFTC release
• Use extreme spec net-long as contrarian sell signal (well-documented top indicator)
• Use extreme commercial net-long as contrarian buy signal
• Combine with the Stock Alpha Aggregator for equity index futures: COT bearish on S&P E-mini + bearish Form 4 insider activity = double-confirmation short
• Pipe into a quant model — COT positioning is a well-studied alpha factor

Source

Official CFTC Socrata API: https://publicreporting.cftc.gov/resource/jun7-fc8e.json. Free, public, no key, no auth. CFTC Commission updates it every Friday afternoon with data through Tuesday of that week.

License

MIT. CFTC data is public domain.