COT Report Weekly Summary: How to Read Each Friday's Release in 15 Minutes

Educational content, not investment advice. This guide explains how to summarize the CFTC's weekly Commitments of Traders data. The worked example uses the report dated September 29, 2026, published October 2, 2026, purely to illustrate the method. It describes positioning only and recommends no trade.

The short answer

Every Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, the CFTC publishes the Commitments of Traders (COT) report: the positions held by each group of traders in several hundred futures markets as of the previous Tuesday. A useful weekly summary does not list every market. It answers five questions:

1. Which markets are at a positioning extreme relative to their own history?
2. What changed state this week, such as a market moving into or out of an extreme, or the crowd switching from adding to cutting?
3. Where do price and positioning disagree?
4. Which crowded positions are held by only a few traders?
5. What changed in the markets I actually trade?

With the right tool that takes about fifteen minutes. This guide shows what to look at for each question, works through a real weekly summary, and lists where to read this week's report today, including free options.

What is in each week's release

The CFTC releases several reports at the same time each Friday, covering positions as of the Tuesday close:

• Legacy: every market, split into Commercial, Non-Commercial and Non-Reportable traders.
• Disaggregated: physical commodities, split into Producer/Merchant, Swap Dealers, Managed Money and Other Reportables.
• Traders in Financial Futures (TFF): currencies, equity indices, interest rates and crypto, split into Dealers, Asset Managers, Leveraged Funds and Other Reportables.
• Supplemental: 13 agricultural markets with commodity index traders shown separately.

Each comes as futures only and as futures and options combined. Each row gives long, short and (where relevant) spreading positions, the weekly change, the share of open interest, the number of traders and the concentration held by the largest traders.

That is a lot of numbers, and almost none of them mean anything on their own. "Managed Money added 3,815 contracts of sugar" says nothing until you know whether sugar funds were already near a record long. A summary has to put each market against its own history first. Without that step, a weekly summary is just a list of numbers.

For the full release schedule, including the weeks when a holiday moves it, see when is the COT report released.

The five checks, one by one

Check 1: Which markets are at an extreme?

Normalize every market's speculative net position (Managed Money in commodities, Leveraged Funds in financial futures) against its own history. The two standard measures are the z-score, which compares this week with the past 52 weeks, and the COT Index, which places this week within a multi-year range from 0 to 100.

COTInsight flags a market when its z-score passes ±1.5 and calls ±2.0 an extreme. In a typical week a meaningful minority of markets are flagged. On the September 29, 2026 report, 81 of the 345 active markets were beyond ±1.5. That is too many to read one by one, so the next checks narrow it down.

Check 2: What changed state?

The most useful line in a weekly summary is the one that did not apply last week. Look for:

• Markets newly crossing into an extreme, or leaving one.
• Regime changes: the crowd switching from building to distributing, or from short to accumulating. COTInsight's eight regimes (Extreme Long, Extreme Short, Building Long, Building Short, Accumulating, Distributing, Flip Zone, Neutral) make this a one-line read.
• Streaks: several consecutive weeks of buying or selling by the same group.

A market that has been extreme for ten weeks is old news. A market that just became extreme, or just started to unwind, is what the week's summary should lead with.

Check 3: Where do price and positioning disagree?

A divergence is price and positioning moving in opposite directions over a few months: price higher while funds are selling, or price lower while funds are buying. It means the trend is running with less speculative support. Read more in COT divergence explained. Divergences are much rarer than extremes (10 markets against 81 flagged extremes on the September 29, 2026 report) and deserve a line each.

Check 4: Who holds the crowded positions?

Of the markets at an extreme, check how concentrated the position is. A crowd spread over a hundred traders behaves differently from the same net position held by five. Also check open interest: an extreme with rising open interest means new money is still arriving, one with falling open interest means positions are already being closed. Trader concentration explains the measures.

Check 5: Your own markets

Finally, go through your watchlist and any open positions, even if nothing there is extreme. Note the level, the direction and whether anything changed since last week. Most weeks this is a quick "no change." The weeks where it is not are the ones that matter.

A worked weekly summary: report of September 29, 2026

Here is what the five checks produced for the report dated Tuesday, September 29, 2026, released Friday, October 2. Readings are from the COTInsight dashboard for that week.

The headline. 81 of 345 active markets were beyond ±1.5 on the z-score. Among the liquid contracts, the most stretched readings clustered in interest rate futures, a few commodities and the pound.

Commodities at an extreme.

Sugar funds were near the top of their three-year range while total open interest in the contract was shrinking. Soybean meal funds had more than doubled their net long in five weeks, from +97,036 on August 25, and were still adding at an accelerating pace.

State changes worth a line.

• Corn: Managed Money net long +377,850, COT Index 93.2, regime Distributing. Funds peaked at +431,062 on September 1, when the z-score read an extreme +2.36, and have sold in three of the four weeks since, including 36,587 contracts this week. The crowd is still near the top of its range but is now leaving. That is the kind of line a summary should lead with.
• Natural gas: Managed Money net short −132,849, COT Index 9.7, regime Building Short. The crowd was adding to an already low position. More than a third of natural gas open interest (34.6%) was Managed Money spreading, which never shows in the net, so the directional read deserves less weight here than in most markets. See the managed money guide.

Financial futures.

• British pound: Leveraged Funds z −2.32, COT Index 7.8, Extreme Short. Fast money was near its most bearish reading on sterling in three years.
• 2-year Treasury note: Leveraged Funds read Extreme Long (z +2.18, COT Index 100) while holding a net short of 1,170,255 contracts. The position was simply the least short it had been in three years. Much of the leveraged short in Treasuries is basis trading against cash bonds, so this reading says little about funds' view on rates.
• Russell 2000: the micro contract read Extreme Long (z +2.58) while the standard E-mini read Building Short with a COT Index of 1.1. The standard contract has roughly eight times the open interest. Read the main contract first.

Unremarkable but worth knowing.

• Gold: Managed Money net long +124,418, z +0.58, COT Index 51.6, Building Long. Large in contracts, middle of its own range.
• Copper: Managed Money net long +78,709, COT Index 96.8. Smaller in contracts than gold, but near the top of its three-year range.

That is a complete weekly summary: one headline, a handful of extremes, the changes, two traps to avoid, and a note on the markets people watch most. None of it says what price will do next. It says where the crowds are, which way they are moving, and where the data needs care.

Two of those lines, the Treasury note and the Russell contracts, are exactly the kind of misreading a summary built only from net positions or raw numbers would get wrong. Our pillar guide how to trade the COT report explains both traps in detail.

Where to read the COT report today

The CFTC itself. The current reports are published on the CFTC's Commitments of Traders page every Friday afternoon, as text tables by exchange. It is free and authoritative, but it is raw: no normalization, no history on the page, no ranking across markets. Our guide to COT report historical data explains why the raw files take so much work to use.

The free weekly COT email. COTInsight sends a free email every Friday with the week's most stretched markets, scored against their own history. It is the short version of Check 1 above, delivered. You can sign up with the email box near the top of this article or on the home page.

The COTInsight dashboard. All five checks across 350+ markets, refreshed automatically after each Friday release:

• Check 1: heatmap and instrument list ranked by z-score and COT Index, with alerts at ±1.5.
• Check 2: eight-state regime, momentum and weekly streak on every market.
• Check 3: divergence flag on every priced market.
• Check 4: participant breakdown and open interest trend on every plan, and Positioning structure (Ultimate), which ranks concentration against each contract's own history.
• Check 5: your own markets in the detail panel, with ten years of history on Pro and the full twenty-year archive on Ultimate.

Subscribers can also receive the weekly COT digest email after each release, managed in account settings, with a deeper version on Ultimate. Ultimate adds an AI analyst read written for every market at an extreme as soon as the data lands, a PDF briefing of the week, the Historical Outcome Analyzer showing what followed comparable readings in each market's past, and VS comparison to put two markets side by side. If you prefer to see it on a chart, the COTInsight TradingView indicator (Ultimate) plots the same z-score, COT Index and regime under your price.

Everything above is available to try for seven days, with no card, through the free trial. Plans are on the pricing page.

Common mistakes in weekly COT summaries

Reporting changes without levels. "Funds bought 15,000 contracts" is meaningless without knowing where the position stood. Always give the level against history first.

Mixing report types. A Legacy Non-Commercial figure one week and a Managed Money figure the next creates changes that never happened. Stay with one series per market.

Treating every extreme as news. A market that has been extreme for months is a condition, not an event. Lead with what changed.

Ignoring the sign under the normalized number. An "extreme long" can be a large net short that has become less short, as in the 2-year note.

Forgetting the date. The positions are as of Tuesday. A summary read on Monday is describing a market as it was six calendar days earlier.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does the weekly COT report come out?

Every Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, covering positions as of the close on the previous Tuesday. When a federal holiday falls in the week, the release usually moves back by a business day or more. See when is the COT report released for the schedule.

Where can I get a free weekly COT report summary?

The raw data is free from the CFTC every Friday. For a summary that ranks markets against their own history, COTInsight sends a free weekly email listing the week's most stretched markets every Friday. Sign up on any article page or on the home page.

What should a weekly COT summary include?

The markets at a positioning extreme against their own history, what changed state this week, any divergence between price and positioning, how concentrated the crowded positions are, and the status of the markets you trade. Raw contract changes without that context are of little use.

How long does it take to analyze the COT report each week?

Done by hand from the CFTC files, it can take hours for more than a handful of markets, because each one has to be normalized against its own history. With a tool that does the normalization, the five checks in this guide take around fifteen minutes.

Does the weekly COT report tell me where price is going?

No. It describes positioning, and on its own it has little short-term predictive power. Traders use it as context and as a risk filter alongside their own price analysis. Our guide on how to trade the COT report covers how.

Summary

A weekly COT summary is useful when it is short and comparative: which markets are extreme against their own history, what changed this week, where price and positioning disagree, who holds the crowded positions, and what moved in your own markets. Fifteen minutes on a Friday evening or a Saturday morning is enough, provided the normalization is already done. Raw contract changes, mixed report types and normalized readings read without their sign are the things that make most weekly summaries less useful than they look.