Commitments of Traders Report
The Commitments of Traders report enables investors to track changes in positions among various groups of traders/investors.
Below is a series of visualizations and commentary, selected to provide both market-specific and broad market measures of investor positioning, as reported by the CFTC.
Read more: How to read the CoT Report
Each week, we select a market & investor group that we believe is important in the current market environment. We display the asset’s price (top panel), the specific group’s net position, measured by the number of contracts (middle panel), and the 5-year z-score of that position (bottom panel). The 5-year z-score shows how many standard deviations away the current value is from the 5-year average.
Highlighted Market Commentary
Large speculators are net long palladium for the first time since 2021. The rise in precious metal prices has extended to palladium, and large speculators have taken notice.
Market Movers
The following chart shows the 1-year change in the 5-year z-score. Each dot represents the difference between the current 5-year z-score and the 5-year z-score 52 weeks ago.
We believe that examining longer-term changes in positioning can provide better insight than analyzing singular data points.
The chart focuses on selected markets within each asset class that could be used to indicate overall positioning. Each data point represents changes in speculator z-scores.
As investors shift their positioning throughout the year, changes in z-score can provide a valuable metric for comparing markets with different levels of open interest and for understanding patterns within specific asset classes.
Market Positioning & Sentiment
Lastly, we provide a weekly update on major market positioning and sentiment. The charts below focus on two assets: the S&P 500 and the 10-year Treasury note. We believe these two markets can be used as a gauge for equity and Treasury markets.
Consensus Inc. surveys an ‘extensive mix of brokerage house analysts and independent advisory services’ to gauge bullish sentiment.
The charts below show this measure smoothed over four weeks and plotted in the orange bars (right axis). The line represents the five-year z-score for the speculators’ position (left axis), which is also smoothed over four weeks.
The first chart shows positioning and sentiment for equities.
The final chart below uses the same format for 10-year Treasury notes. Note that the 10-year yield in the top panel is plotted inversely.
