COT Report for Sugar Traders: Managed Money, Index Funds, and the Mills on the Other Side
Key takeaways
- Sugar No. 11 is one of the largest agricultural futures markets in the world, with 1,591,522 contracts of open interest in the CFTC report dated 25 August 2026.
- It is also one of 13 markets with a Supplemental report, so index money can be separated from genuine hedgers. On sugar that matters: index traders hold 24.3% of open interest long.
- In August 2026 Managed Money went from net short 112,413 to net long 207,082 in four weeks, a 319,495-contract swing, on open interest up 32%.
- The resulting z-score of +4.07 is the second highest of 1,030 scorable weeks since June 2006. Only the week before it was higher.
- Sugar reached that from a record net short of −248,296 set on 3 March 2026. Both ends of the range were printed in the same year.
Introduction
Sugar is the market where COT analysis works best and gets used least. It has everything the method needs: a huge speculative cohort, a well-defined physical hedging community, an index-money overlay you can actually isolate, and a history of positioning extremes that resolve violently.
This guide covers which cohorts to read in Sugar No. 11, how index money distorts the commercial line, what the current reading looks like, and what the historical record says about extremes this size.
The Contract
Sugar No. 11 is the world benchmark for raw cane sugar, traded on ICE Futures U.S., 112,000 pounds per contract, delivered free-on-board at the origin port. It is the price the physical trade actually transacts against, which is why the hedging side of the COT report is unusually meaningful here: those are real mills, refiners, traders and origin exporters, not proxies.
The market is large. Open interest of 1,591,522 contracts on 25 August 2026 puts sugar ahead of every other soft commodity and above most metals.
Which Cohorts Matter
The Disaggregated report splits sugar into four groups. They are not equally useful.
Managed Money. Hedge funds, CTAs and systematic programs. This is the cohort that crowds, that gets stopped out, and whose extremes are worth measuring. When people say "the specs are long sugar", this is who they mean. It is the series COTInsight scores.
Producer/Merchant/Processor/User. Mills, refiners, origin exporters, industrial buyers. Structurally net short, because the physical trade is long the crop and hedges by selling futures. Their net position is not a forecast, it is a function of how much sugar exists and how much of it has been priced.
Swap Dealers. Intermediaries, largely facing index and OTC flow. In sugar their book is dominated by the index business described below.
Other Reportable. Large traders who fit nowhere else. Usually small enough to ignore.
The practical rule: read Managed Money for crowding, read the hedgers for absorption capacity, and treat swap dealers as plumbing.
The Index-Money Problem, and Why Sugar Lets You Solve It
Sugar is a core weight in the major commodity indices, so a large block of long futures is held by index replicators. Those positions are long-only, price-insensitive and rolled on a schedule. They are not a view.
In the Legacy report they sit inside the commercial category, which makes "commercial" on sugar a blend of hedgers and pension allocations. Sugar is one of the 13 markets where the Supplemental report separates them, and it is worth doing. From the report dated 25 August 2026:
- Index traders long: 386,015 contracts, 24.3% of total open interest
- Index traders short: 78,484 contracts
- Index traders net: +307,531
Roughly a quarter of the long side of the sugar market has no opinion about sugar. Any commercial reading that does not remove it is measuring two different things at once. The mechanics are covered in full in Index traders in the COT report.
The August 2026 Reading
Sugar is currently at one of the most stretched speculative readings in its recorded history. The four-week sequence, Managed Money net position, from the CFTC weekly file:
| Report date | Managed Money net | z-score (52w) | COT Index (156w) | Open interest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28 Jul 2026 | −112,413 | +0.74 | 29.4 | 1,203,654 |
| 4 Aug 2026 | −77,814 | +1.44 | 36.9 | 1,252,623 |
| 11 Aug 2026 | +58,990 | +3.66 | 66.5 | 1,424,802 |
| 18 Aug 2026 | +151,349 | +4.23 | 86.5 | 1,518,674 |
| 25 Aug 2026 | +207,082 | +4.07 | 98.6 | 1,591,522 |
Underneath the net figure, both legs moved. Managed Money longs rose from 181,809 to 309,452 contracts, and shorts fell from 294,222 to 102,370. So this was not a short squeeze alone and not fresh buying alone. It was both at once: +127,643 new longs and −191,852 shorts covered, a total swing of 319,495 contracts in four weekly reports.
Open interest rose 32.2% over the same span, from 1,203,654 to 1,591,522. That detail decides the interpretation. A positioning flip on falling open interest is one crowd handing off to another. A flip on sharply rising open interest is genuinely new money entering the market, which means the position is larger and more leveraged than the net number alone suggests.
Who took the other side
The Supplemental split shows exactly where the risk went, over the same four reports:
| Group | 28 Jul 2026 | 25 Aug 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Index traders, net | +218,959 | +307,531 | +88,572 |
| Non-commercials excluding index, net | −124,903 | +55,509 | +180,412 |
| Commercials excluding index, net | −99,278 | −411,500 | −312,222 |
The physical trade absorbed essentially all of it, taking their net short from just under 100,000 to over 400,000 contracts. Mills selling forward into a fund-driven rally is the most normal thing in the sugar market. The scale is what is unusual.
What the Historical Record Says About a Reading This Size
Over 1,030 scorable weeks since 13 June 2006, sugar's Managed Money z-score has been:
- beyond ±2.0 in 11.5% of weeks
- above +3.0 in 1.55% of weeks
- above +4.0 in 0.19% of weeks, which is two weeks, both of them August 2026
The current +4.07 ranks second of 1,030, behind only the +4.23 printed the week before. Since 2006 there have been just four episodes where the z-score first crossed +3.0: December 2007, October 2013, October 2015 and August 2026.
Two pieces of context stop this from becoming a trade on its own.
The range was set at both ends this year. The record net short in this series, −248,296, was printed on 3 March 2026. Five months later the market is at a top-two crowding reading. A market that can travel that far that fast is not one to fade on positioning alone.
The COT Index has pinned. At 98.6 on a 156-week window, and 100.0 on 26 and 52 weeks, the Index has almost nothing left to say. From here the z-score and the weekly change in net position carry the information. That distinction is covered in COT Index explained.
How to Trade Around It, Carefully
Extreme positioning is a risk statement, not a signal. It says the marginal buyer is scarce and that a liquidation, if it starts, has a long way to run. It does not say when. Our measurement of how long extremes persist is here.
Watch open interest for the turn. While OI keeps rising, new money is still arriving and the trend has fuel. The meaningful change is z-score flattening or rolling over while open interest declines. That combination is the unwind beginning, and it is visible in the data before it is obvious on the chart.
Respect the fundamental clock. Sugar positioning does not move in a vacuum. Brazilian Centre-South crush pace, Indian export policy, Thai output and the ethanol parity that decides how much cane goes to sugar versus fuel all drive the flow. Positioning tells you how crowded the expression of a view has become. It does not tell you whether the view is right.
Do not read the commercial line raw. With index traders at 24.3% of open interest long, the ex-index commercial figure is the one that reflects hedging.
Where COTInsight Fits
The sugar market page carries the current positioning read, and inside the app sugar sits on the same board as around 350 other weekly-reporting markets, ranked by extremity, with the z-score, 156-week COT Index, regime state, open-interest trend, divergence check and the Supplemental index overlay on one screen. History runs to 13 June 2006. Alerts fire when a market crosses a threshold, so the sequence above would have surfaced on 11 August rather than being noticed after the fact.
Pro gives you the full board and ten years of weekly history on sugar. Ultimate adds the twenty-year archive back to 2006, the historical outcome statistics for each z-score bucket, the index-trader overlay used above, options exposure, the AI commentary, and the TradingView indicator so the same z-score and COT Index sit on your sugar chart rather than in another tab.
Related softs: coffee, cotton, cocoa. Pricing is here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Sugar No. 11? The world benchmark contract for raw cane sugar, traded on ICE Futures U.S., 112,000 pounds per contract, priced free-on-board at the origin port. Sugar No. 16 is the separate U.S. domestic contract.
Which COT cohort should I watch in sugar? Managed Money, from the Disaggregated report. It is the speculative cohort that crowds and liquidates. Commercials are informative only after index money is removed using the Supplemental report.
How much of the sugar market is index money? Index traders held 386,015 long contracts on 25 August 2026, which is 24.3% of the 1,591,522 contracts of open interest.
Is a z-score of +4 a sell signal? No. It says speculative positioning is more crowded than in all but one week since 2006, which is a statement about risk asymmetry and about who is left to buy. Timing needs open interest, price structure and the fundamental calendar alongside it.
When does sugar COT data update? Every Friday at 3:30pm Eastern, reflecting positions as of the preceding Tuesday, on the same schedule as the rest of the CFTC report.