ESMA

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) is the EU's financial markets regulator, established in 2011 under Regulation 1095/2010, headquartered in Paris. It directly supervises credit rating agencies and trade repositories, issues binding technical standards under MiFID II, and co-leads gas and commodity market policy coordination alongside DG Energy and ACER. Under MiFID II, ESMA requires investment firms and trading venues to report weekly commodity derivatives position data, which it publishes as aggregated Monday reports covering prior Friday positions across EU-regulated investment firms.

ESMA's expanded role under the 2024 REMIT revision became operational in H2 2026, activating cross-border investigatory powers for energy market abuse. In June 2026, ESMA co-authored staff working document SWD(2026)147 alongside DG Energy and ACER, reviewing EU gas spot and derivatives market structure and finding no structural market-failure justification for emergency intervention.

In the european-oil-markets series, ESMA's weekly MiFID II position report for ICE Brent and ICE Gasoil futures is the European complement to the CFTC's COT. Published Monday for prior Friday positions, it covers EU-regulated investment firms only; post-Brexit, London-based banks report under FCA rules, creating a gap in the ESMA dataset for ICE Brent positions held by UK-jurisdiction firms. In the WTI-short/Brent-long divergence captured in the 28 April 2026 CFTC data, ESMA's MiFID II data was the additional layer for ICE Gasoil positioning from European-domiciled asset managers and banks, which the CFTC does not publish for the gasoil contract.

For oil trading desks, the combined CFTC + ESMA read gives the full speculative positioning picture across the crude-to-products spread complex. CFTC covers WTI and ICE Brent with depth; ESMA fills the CFTC gap in ICE Gasoil and captures European bank and asset-manager positioning absent from the CFTC's participant categories.