CFTC Commitment of Traders
Every week the government publishes what the big speculative funds are betting on corn, beans, wheat, cattle, hogs and milk. These are hedge funds and commodity traders: they trade paper and never own a bushel. This page shows where they sit today, how crowded that is against every week of the same report we hold, and what it does and does not tell you about price.
It is not a forecast. We tested that on the full record and published the result below. Crowded positioning tells you how much buying or selling could be forced if the market turns, not which way it turns. Positions are counted on Tuesday and published Friday afternoon, so they are three days old when they land and older every day after — the figures below carry their own age.
Fund Positioning by Commodity
Where Every Market Stands
Each market placed by how crowded fund positioning is against its own record, and by what price has done since. Position is measured as a share of all open contracts, so an old reading and a new one mean the same thing in a market that has since changed size. Bottom right is the corner to watch: funds crowded long while price has already turned down.
What moved this week
Ranked by the size of the week's change against each market's own open interest, so 84,000 contracts in corn and 28,000 in Chicago wheat can be compared. The last column is that change scored against this market's own history of weekly changes.
Scatter plot of fund positioning percentile against thirteen-week price change for every tracked market. The same figures are in the table below.
Show the board as a table
Does This Predict Prices?
The question everyone asks about this report, measured on the whole record rather than asserted. Correlation runs from −1 to +1; zero means no relationship.
Managed Money Net Position — 52 Weeks
One Market At A Time
Pick a market. Every figure is drawn from the full CFTC record. Forward returns are measured from the first close after the report was published, which is not always the Monday: federal holidays move it.
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Why Our Numbers Are Lower Than The Ones You'll See Elsewhere
Four mistakes make a positioning study look better than the trade it describes. They all push the same way, and they are all easy to make by accident.
- Measuring from a price that had not printed yet. Positions are held as of Tuesday. The report comes out Friday at 3:30pm Eastern, after the grains have settled for the week, and later than that when a federal holiday falls in the report week. A study that measures from the Tuesday close gives itself three days of the move it claims to have predicted. Every return here starts at the first close after the report existed.
- Reading a contract roll as a price move. A continuous front-month chart steps by the whole spread when the front month changes. Corn's July to September roll is old crop to new crop and is routinely 20 to 50 cents. Those steps are removed here before anything is measured.
- Counting overlapping weeks as separate evidence. Thirteen-week returns sampled every week share twelve weeks of the same price path. Eighty matches can be six actual spells. Each read below prints both numbers.
- Searching until something is significant. Around a hundred tests run every week. At the usual threshold, five look real by chance alone. The whole batch is counted and corrected before anything is called a finding.
What Does This Mean for Farmers?
What is the COT Report?
The CFTC publishes Commitments of Traders every Friday at 3:30pm Eastern, counting positions held as of the previous Tuesday. It splits the market into four reportable categories: managed money, producers and merchants, swap dealers and other reportables, plus a small-trader remainder. This page leads with managed money, which is the speculative money, and breaks out all five further down. Every contract has two sides, so the categories net to zero: when funds buy, somebody sold.
How to Use It
As a measure of who is exposed, not of where price is going. We tested that on the whole record and published the result above. Positioning and price move together in the week they are measured; the relationship with the next four to thirteen weeks is close to zero. What a crowded position does tell you is how much buying or selling could be forced if the market turns, which is a reason to protect unpriced bushels rather than a reason to predict a direction.
What "Managed Money" Means
CTAs, commodity pools and hedge funds. They do not own grain, they trade paper, and their buying and selling moves the futures leg. It does not follow that it moves your basis. Basis is your local cash price minus futures, and it is set by what is happening at your elevator: bushels arriving, space, freight and demand. Fund flow and basis frequently move in opposite directions.
Where The Position Sits
The bar on each card covers the last year. The sections above rank the same position against the whole record we hold, measured as a share of all open contracts, which is the comparison that survives a market doubling in size. When the card and the section disagree they are answering different questions: one about this year, one about the whole record.
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