ICE Brent and the COT Report: The Biggest Oil Contract Most Tools Miss
Key takeaways
- ICE Brent is the largest crude futures contract in the world. On the 1 September 2026 report it carried 3,475,202 contracts of open interest against NYMEX WTI's 2,556,627.
- It appears in no CFTC file. ICE Futures Europe is regulated by the UK's FCA and publishes its own Commitments of Traders report.
- Most COT tools that show a "Brent" reading are showing BRENT LAST DAY on NYMEX, a cash-settled look-alike carrying 310,447 open interest, under a tenth the size.
- The two disagree. On the same report the NYMEX contract read COT Index 44.5 while the real ICE Brent book read 61.9.
- The same gap covers gasoil, London cocoa, robusta coffee and white sugar, none of which exist in CFTC data.
Introduction
If you trade Brent and read positioning data, there is a reasonable chance you have been reading the wrong contract.
Not a slightly different one. A contract with roughly a tenth the open interest, a different settlement mechanism, and a positioning reading that can sit seventeen index points away from the market you are actually trading.
This is not anybody's error. It is a regulatory boundary that most tools quietly route around rather than explain.
Why ICE Brent Is Not in the CFTC Report
The CFTC regulates US futures exchanges. Its weekly Commitments of Traders report covers contracts listed on those exchanges: NYMEX, COMEX, CBOT, CME, ICE Futures U.S., and a handful of others.
ICE Brent trades on ICE Futures Europe, which is regulated in the United Kingdom by the Financial Conduct Authority. It is outside the CFTC's remit, so it appears in no CFTC file, and no amount of searching the Disaggregated report will produce it.
ICE Futures Europe publishes its own Commitments of Traders report instead, weekly, against the same Tuesday snapshot, in the CFTC's own column format. It is public and free. It is simply somewhere else.
What Most Tools Show Instead
Search the CFTC data for "Brent" and you will find something: BRENT LAST DAY, NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE, contract code 06765T. It is a real contract, cash-settled against the Brent benchmark, and it is in the CFTC report because it is listed on NYMEX.
It is also small. On the 1 September 2026 report:
| ICE Brent | NYMEX Brent Last Day | |
|---|---|---|
| Exchange | ICE Futures Europe | NYMEX |
| Regulator | UK FCA | CFTC |
| Open interest | 3,475,202 | 310,447 |
| COT Index | 61.9 | 44.5 |
| Spec traders reported | 174 | withheld |
The last row deserves a note. The CFTC writes a full stop rather than a number when too few traders hold a position to disclose the count, and the NYMEX Brent contract carries that marker. That is not zero traders, and it should never be read as zero. It does mean the speculative cohort is small enough that the exchange declines to break it down.
Seventeen index points apart, on the same day, for two contracts both called Brent.
This Is Also What Your Chart Shows
Worth knowing if you use a COT indicator on TradingView, including ours.
TradingView carries the CFTC series. Its Brent tickers, UKOIL, BCOUSD and BZ1!, all resolve to the CFTC's NYMEX Brent contract, because that is the only Brent contract in CFTC data. So a COT indicator on a Brent chart gives you a complete, correct reading of the NYMEX contract.
That is genuinely useful, and the COTInsight TradingView indicator maps 99 chart symbols across 55 CFTC markets so the reading appears on whichever Brent ticker your data provider uses. Just know which book you are looking at. For the ICE contract itself, the dashboard is the place.
What Else Lives on ICE Futures Europe
Brent is the headline, but the boundary covers more.
Gasoil is the European middle-distillate benchmark and the hedging instrument for diesel, heating oil and jet across Europe and Asia. It carried 994,985 contracts of open interest on the 1 September 2026 report and appears in no CFTC file. It is a cleaner read on refining margins than crude is, because gasoil demand moves with industrial activity and winter heating rather than with crude supply. See the gasoil COT page.
The London softs are separate contracts from their New York cousins, with their own delivery specifications, participants and positioning. London cocoa prices West African beans into European grinders. Robusta coffee is the bitterer bean used in instant and espresso blends, grown mainly in Vietnam and Brazil, and it trades independently of New York arabica. White sugar is the refined counterpart to New York raw No. 11, and the spread between them is the refining margin.
Reading arabica positioning and assuming it covers robusta is the same category of error as reading NYMEX Brent and assuming it covers ICE.
How to Use Both Books Together
The most useful thing about having WTI and real Brent side by side is that their disagreements are informative.
WTI prices barrels at Cushing, Oklahoma, and reflects US pipeline capacity, shale output and domestic storage. Brent prices waterborne cargoes and reflects freight, transit risk through chokepoints, and OPEC+ supply decisions.
When speculative positioning reaches an extreme in one and not the other, that is usually a regional dislocation rather than a global one. When both stretch together, the story is about the barrel itself. That comparison is only available if you hold the actual Brent book rather than its NYMEX proxy.
Pair it with trader concentration and you can also see whether the length in either market is broadly held or sitting in a few hands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ICE Brent data as reliable as CFTC data?
It is the same kind of report, published weekly by the exchange against the same Tuesday snapshot, in the CFTC's own column format. It is not a vendor estimate. COTInsight reads it directly from ICE.
When is it published?
ICE publishes on Friday, a couple of hours ahead of the CFTC's 15:30 Eastern release. COTInsight refreshes once the CFTC release is confirmed, so both land in the same Friday update rather than a fresh week sitting beside a stale one.
How far back does the history go?
COTInsight holds ICE weekly history from January 2011, which is 818 weeks for Brent and gasoil.
Why do other COT tools not carry it?
Because it is a separate feed from a separate regulator, in a file that has no contract codes of its own and dates its rows differently from the CFTC. It is free and public, and it takes deliberate work to add rather than falling out of the CFTC download everyone already runs.
Which plan includes ICE markets?
All of them. Pro and Ultimate both cover the full book, including ICE Futures Europe and the LME metals. The tiers differ on history depth and on the analysis layers, not on which markets you can see. See pricing.
Which other COT tools carry ICE Brent?
None that we could fetch on 8 September 2026. The publisher-by-publisher comparison is in best COT report tools compared, and the free routes are covered in free COT tools and what they leave out.
Summary
The largest crude futures contract in the world is not in the CFTC report, because it is not a US contract. Tools that show a Brent reading from CFTC data alone are showing a NYMEX look-alike with under a tenth of the open interest, and on the current report the two sit seventeen COT Index points apart.
The same boundary hides gasoil and the London softs. All of it is free and public. It is just published by a different regulator, in a different place.