Commitments of Traders
CFTC's weekly report of futures market positioning by trader category.
The CFTC's 17 July Commitments of Traders print, covering positions only to 14 July, showed crude managed-money length collapsing 69% to 19,783 contracts, a snapshot already three days stale when Iran struck a Kuwaiti power plant that same day.
Last refreshed: 3 August 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why did money managers cut crude length 23% just as Brent rallied 12% to $79?
Timeline for Commitments of Traders
Mentioned in: Money went into WTI, not into Brent
European Oil MarketsMentioned in: First net long of the rally on 06765T
European Oil MarketsMentioned in: WTI net length falls to 19,783 lots
European Oil MarketsCaptured week-to-7-July positioning after a delayed release
European Oil Markets: Funds cut crude length into the rallyBackground
Commitments of Traders (COT) is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's weekly disclosure of how different classes of trader are positioned across US futures markets. It splits open interest into commercial hedgers, non-commercial (managed money) speculators and other reportable categories, letting a reader distinguish a price move driven by fresh speculative conviction from one driven by short-covering or hedging flow, rather than treating open interest as a single undifferentiated number.
Structurally, the report is a lagging indicator: it captures positions as of the prior Tuesday but is not published until the following Friday, a gap that matters most at turning points, when the market has already moved on before the snapshot reaches readers.
Reading its crude figures also requires care over what each named line covers. The report's only Brent line, Brent Last Day (NYMEX), tracks a NYMEX-listed, cash-settled contract, not the ICE Futures Europe Brent contract that prices most internationally traded crude, which ICE reports separately. That distinction, not the CFTC's institutional history as a regulator, is what makes the report useful or misleading depending on how carefully a reader applies it.
The report always lags the market
The Commitments of Traders report is a weekly snapshot, not a forecast: it captures positions as of the prior Tuesday but is not published until the following Friday. The 17 July print, covering positions only to 14 July, showed managed money had already cut crude bets 69% week-on-week, to 19,783 contracts.
That snapshot was three days out of date before Iran struck a Kuwaiti power plant on 17 July, and older still by the escalation that followed later that week. Nobody reading the print in isolation could tell whether traders had already reversed course by the time it reached them, which is the report's structural limit at any turning point.
The split separates conviction from covering
The report divides open interest into commercial, non-commercial (managed money) and other reportable categories so a reader can judge whether a price move reflects fresh conviction or short-covering. In the print covering 7 July, managed money had already cut West Texas Intermediate length 23%, to 64,041 contracts, while petrol (RBOB) bets held near 71,249, a divergence the category breakdown makes visible that a single headline figure would hide.
That cut landed before Hormuz tensions flared on 8 July, leaving the reported fund book lighter than usual heading into the escalation, a sequencing only the report's weekly cadence and category split let a reader reconstruct after the fact.