The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (Commission or CFTC) publishes the Commitments of Traders (COT) reports helping the public understand market dynamics. Specifically, the COT reports provide a breakdown of each Tuesday’s open interest for futures and options on futures markets in which 20 or more traders hold positions equal to or above the reporting levels established by the CFTC.
Types of reports and traders included in the COT index indicator
You can consider COT as legal insider information. Who knows fundamentals better than those who produce a commodity or those who consume it by using the COT index, you can see the flow of money and true sentiment in the market which is based on the real positioning of large players. Combine COT with a reasonable timing tool such as price action and you have a reliable strategy.
Legacy
- Commercials
- Non-Commercials
TIFF
The Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) report includes financial contracts, such as currencies, US Treasury securities, Eurodollars, stocks, VIX and Bloomberg commodity index.
- Dealers
- Asset Managers
- Leveraged Funds
Disaggregated
The Disaggregated reports are broken down by agriculture, petroleum and products, natural gas and products, electricity and metals and other physical contracts.
Cot index and Cot dashboards give you bias by using REAL positionings of the large traders, a leading indicator which is not simply based on price data, it’s based on ACTUAL open interest in the market. Add the COT indicator as a leading bias indicator to your technical as a timing tool and you have a professional trading strategy.
What is the CoT Index?
The cTrader COT index is a technique used to quickly quantify the actions of a group of traders which allows us to put into perspective the weekly positions of these commercial traders to have a constant reference point by which to judge their actions very quickly and how their current level of buying and selling compares to any previous time in the past 3 years.
What is the ADR indicator?
This ADR indicator is based on statistical data which calculates the standard deviation for the daily and weekly movements. Any abnormal daily or weekly range (small and extended) is defined by red colour.
What is the CoT Dashboard (commercial)?
There are two different dashboards, one for commercials (Dealers and producers) and one for non-commercial (Asset managers and Managed money).
This dashboard shows commercial data.
What is the CoT Dashboard (non-commercial)?
This dashboard shows the non-commercial (Asset managers and Managed money).
Getting Started
COT index automatically connects to the Quandl website to get COT data. The user needs to subscribe at Quandl and gets a free API key.
You can find Instructions on how to get a free API key at https://docs.data.nasdaq.com/docs/getting-started
How to Use
The first step is to get familiar with this type of indicator and how it can help your trading, there is a user guide that explains all the data you see and you can also follow the links below for additional educational material.
How To Install
First, make sure you have the cTrader trading platform installed and then simply unzip the file and double-click on it to automatically install it onto the platform.
Any Questions?
If you have any questions, please first search our product help forum for the answer, if you cannot find it, post a new question.
