Managed Money in the COT Report: Who They Are, What They Do, and How to Read Them

Educational content, not investment advice. This article explains a category in the CFTC's Commitments of Traders data and describes what that category has done historically. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Figures come from CFTC Commitments of Traders data covering reports from June 2006 to the report dated September 29, 2026.

The short answer

Managed Money is the CFTC's name for professional money managers trading commodity futures for clients: registered commodity trading advisors (CTAs), registered commodity pool operators (CPOs), and unregistered funds the CFTC identifies. In practice that means hedge funds and systematic trend-following funds. They appear in the Disaggregated COT report, which covers physical commodities such as gold, crude oil, corn and cattle.

When traders, analysts and financial journalists say "the funds are long gold" or "speculators cut their crude position," the number they are almost always quoting is the Managed Money net position: Managed Money longs minus Managed Money shorts.

Here is the most useful thing we can tell you about that number, and it comes from twenty years of weekly data across 23 major commodity markets. When Managed Money changes its position, it agrees with the previous week's price move 68.4% of the time, with the same week's price move 56.9% of the time, and with the next week's price move 49.7% of the time. That last figure is a coin flip. Funds buy what has already gone up and sell what has already gone down. They follow price. They do not, as a group, see it coming.

That single finding changes how the category should be read, and the rest of this guide explains why, along with exactly where to find the data and what to look at.

Where Managed Money sits in the report

The CFTC publishes positioning in several formats. Managed Money only exists in one of them.

The Disaggregated report splits every reporting trader in a commodity market into four groups. In the CFTC's own words from its explanatory notes:

• Producer/Merchant/Processor/User: an entity that "predominantly engages in the production, processing, packing or handling of a physical commodity and uses the futures markets to manage or hedge risks associated with those activities." Miners, farmers, refiners, grain merchants.
• Swap Dealer: an entity that "deals primarily in swaps for a commodity and uses the futures markets to manage or hedge the risk associated with those swaps transactions." In practice, largely bank swap desks.
• Money Manager: "a registered commodity trading advisor (CTA); a registered commodity pool operator (CPO); or an unregistered fund identified by CFTC." This is the Managed Money column.
• Other Reportables: "every other reportable trader that is not placed into one of the other three categories." A mixed group of large traders that fit none of the other three.

Whatever is left below the reporting thresholds goes into Non-Reportable positions, the small traders.

Two caveats from the CFTC itself are worth knowing. Classification is based on a trader's predominant business, judged by CFTC staff from Form 40 filings and conversations with the trader, and the CFTC notes that placement "may involve some exercise of judgment." Staff place each reportable trader in the one category that best fits its predominant activity, so a firm that both speculates and hedges is reported under a single label. The categories are good, not perfect.

For financial futures the equivalent of Managed Money is Leveraged Funds in the TFF report. The CFTC describes them as typically hedge funds and various types of money managers, including CTAs, CPOs and unregistered funds, whose strategies "may involve taking outright positions or arbitrage within and across markets." That arbitrage clause matters, and we will come back to it.

Managed Money is not the same as Non-Commercial

This trips up more traders than anything else in the report. The Legacy report's Non-Commercial column and the Disaggregated report's Managed Money column are often treated as the same "large speculator" number. They are not, and the gap is large.

Here is gold on the report dated September 29, 2026, read from the CFTC's own public data:

The Legacy Non-Commercial net position is 69% larger than the Managed Money net position in the same market on the same day. The reason is visible in the table. The CFTC's own notes say the traders reported as Non-Commercial in the Legacy report are split into "money managers" and "other reportables" in the Disaggregated report. Add those two nets and you get 210,180, one contract off the Legacy figure. We checked the same sum in seven other markets that week (silver, copper, corn, WTI, natural gas, sugar and live cattle) and it matched to within one contract every time, while the gap between Non-Commercial and Managed Money alone ranged widely.

So if one website tells you "large speculators are net long 210,000 gold contracts" and another says "funds are net long 124,000," both are correct. They are measuring different crowds. The practical rule: pick one series and stay with it. Comparing this week's Managed Money figure with last year's Non-Commercial figure, which happens constantly in commentary, produces a change that never happened.

There is a second definitional trap on the hedging side. Swap Dealers in gold are short 223,670 contracts, and in the Legacy report they are counted as Commercials. That is why the Legacy Commercial short looks so enormous in gold and why the old rule "commercials are the smart money" breaks in metals. A bank hedging a swap book is not a mine hedging next year's output. We covered that argument in detail in are commercials really the smart money and in commercial vs non-commercial positioning.

The finding: funds follow price

We looked at 23 major commodity markets across energy, metals, grains, softs and livestock, each still reporting on September 29, 2026 with at least five years of weekly history, going back to June 2006: 23,741 market-weeks in total.

For each week we asked a simple question: did the Managed Money net position change in the same direction as price? We compared the change with the price move of the week before, the same week, and the week after.

If funds were leading price, the third row would be the high one. Instead it is indistinguishable from chance, while the first row is very far from it. Funds add to longs after price has risen and cut them after it has fallen. The pattern holds in every commodity sector, which rules out one sector driving the average:

That fits who is in the category. Many CTAs run systematic trend-following models that buy strength and sell weakness with a delay, and a position built that way behaves like a smoothed record of the recent trend.

Now the contrast. Run the same test on the 23 financial futures markets in the TFF report using Leveraged Funds and the pattern disappears: 48.0% against the previous week, 50.5% against the same week, 49.7% against the next. In currencies, rates and equity indices, a big part of the Leveraged Funds book is relative-value and basis trading, the "arbitrage within and across markets" in the CFTC's definition. A hedge fund that is short Treasury futures against a long cash bond position is not betting on direction, and its futures position will not track the price trend. Treating Leveraged Funds as if they were commodity Managed Money is a category error, and the S&P 500 COT guide shows how the basis trade distorts that market in particular.

What the finding does and does not mean

It does not mean Managed Money data is useless. It means the data describes positioning, not foresight. Three things follow, and they are the core of how to read the category:

1. A big fund position is the result of a trend, not the cause of the next one. "Funds are buying gold" is mostly a restatement of "gold has been going up."
2. What matters is how stretched the position is, not which way it changed this week. A week of buying in a market that funds are already heavily long carries very different risk from a week of buying out of a heavy short. The weekly change on its own tells you little.
3. The risk Managed Money creates is on the exit. When a crowded trend-following position has to unwind, the same lagged mechanics work in reverse. That is why the extremes matter more than the direction, and why what happens after a COT extreme is the natural follow-up question.

How to read Managed Money, step by step

1. Net position, then put it on a scale

The raw net number means nothing on its own. 124,418 contracts of gold is not comparable to 124,418 contracts of lean hogs, and it is not even comparable to gold's own position ten years ago, when open interest was different. Normalize it in two ways:

• Z-score: how far the current net position is from its own 52-week average, in standard deviations. COTInsight flags a market when this passes ±1.5 and calls ±2.0 an extreme.
• COT Index: where the current net sits in its own three-year range, from 0 to 100.

On September 29, 2026, gold's Managed Money net of +124,418 read a z-score of +0.58 and a COT Index of 51.6. A large position in absolute terms, an unremarkable one relative to gold's own recent history. Copper's net of +78,709 was a much smaller number but read a COT Index of 96.8, near the top of its three-year range. Size alone would have told you the opposite story.

2. Long and short separately

A net position can rise because funds bought, or because funds that were short covered. Those are different events. Short covering is finite: once the shorts are gone, that buying stops. In gold on September 29, Managed Money held 134,658 contracts long and only 10,240 short. Short sellers were already close to absent, a situation we wrote about in almost nobody is short gold. Any further rise in the net position would have to come from new longs.

3. Spreading, the column most people skip

Managed Money also reports spreading positions: offsetting longs and shorts in different delivery months of the same contract. A spread is a bet on the shape of the curve, not on direction, and it is excluded from the net position. It is also bigger than most people assume:

In natural gas, more than a third of all open interest is fund spreading. A dashboard that shows only the net position is ignoring the single largest Managed Money activity in that market. When a market's spreading share is high, read the net position with less confidence. A good share of what funds are doing there is not directional at all. Our natural gas COT guide goes into this market in detail.

4. How many traders hold it

The Disaggregated report also counts traders. On September 29, 89 Managed Money traders held gold longs, 16 held shorts and 69 held spreads (one trader can appear in more than one column). A position held by many traders is a crowd. The same position held by a handful is a few large books, and it behaves differently when it unwinds. This is the subject of trader concentration, and it is the reason COTInsight's Positioning structure panel (Ultimate) ranks each market's concentration against its own history rather than showing the raw count.

5. Which version of the report

Every Disaggregated figure exists twice: futures only, and futures and options combined. Options are converted to a futures equivalent using delta. In markets with active options the two can differ meaningfully, so check which one your source uses, and see futures only vs combined for when each is the better read. COTInsight defaults to combined and offers a Futures Only view on Ultimate.

Managed Money in the major markets

Managed Money is not equally important everywhere. A few patterns are worth knowing before you read any single market.

• Gold and silver. Managed Money is the main speculative driver, and the dominant hedger is the swap dealer, not the miner. Read Managed Money against swap dealer positioning, not against "commercials." See the gold and silver guides.
• Crude oil. The NYMEX and ICE contracts split the market, and Brent's main positioning report comes from ICE in London rather than the CFTC. A US-only read of fund positioning in oil is a partial read. See ICE Brent and the COT report.
• Grains. Managed Money positions in corn, soybeans and wheat can swing from large longs to large shorts with the seasons and the weather, and the funds often move together across all three. The grain traders guide covers the synchronized extremes.
• Softs and livestock. Thinner markets where a few large funds can dominate. Trader counts matter more here than anywhere else.

How COTInsight shows Managed Money

Everything above can be done by hand from the CFTC's files. It takes a while, which is the gap COTInsight was built to close. For every commodity market the dashboard shows:

• The Managed Money net position with its z-score, COT Index and weekly change, refreshed every Friday after the CFTC release.
• A participant breakdown of all four Disaggregated groups plus non-reportables, long, short, net and spreading, with history charts.
• An eight-state regime reading (such as Building Long, Distributing or Extreme Short) that combines how stretched the position is with which way it is moving.
• A divergence flag when price and Managed Money have moved in opposite directions over twelve weeks.
• Pro: ten years of history and the structured weekly CSV export across every market.
• Ultimate: the twenty-year archive, the Historical Outcome Analyzer showing what price did after every comparable Managed Money reading in that market's own record, Positioning structure, VS comparison to put two markets' fund positioning side by side, and the REST API.

The same z-score, COT Index and regime readings are available directly on your price chart through the COTInsight TradingView indicator (Ultimate), which is where most traders find it easiest to see Managed Money against the trend it is following.

You can see all of it on every market with the 7-day free trial, no card required. Plans and the full feature list are on the pricing page.

Common mistakes with Managed Money

Reading the weekly change as a signal. The data above says the weekly change mostly echoes last week's price. Treating "funds bought 20,000 contracts" as bullish news is reading the trend twice.

Mixing Managed Money and Non-Commercial. Different crowds, different numbers. In gold the gap was 69% on a single day.

Treating Leveraged Funds like Managed Money. In financial futures a large part of the leveraged book is hedged or relative-value. Direction is much harder to infer.

Ignoring spreading. In natural gas, a third of open interest is fund spreading that never shows up in the net.

Forgetting the lag. Positions are as of Tuesday and published Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern. By the time you read the report, three trading days have passed. We measured whether that matters in does the COT report lag matter.

Taking an extreme as a timing signal. A crowded Managed Money position can stay crowded for weeks. We measured how long in how long COT extremes last.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does managed money mean in the COT report?

Managed Money is the CFTC's category for professional money managers trading commodity futures on behalf of clients: registered commodity trading advisors, registered commodity pool operators, and unregistered funds the CFTC identifies. In practice it captures hedge funds and systematic trend-following funds. It appears in the Disaggregated COT report, which covers physical commodities.

Is managed money the same as non-commercial?

No. In the Legacy report, Non-Commercial combines Managed Money and Other Reportables. On September 29, 2026, gold's Legacy Non-Commercial net position was +210,181 contracts while its Managed Money net position was +124,418, a 69% difference in the same market on the same day.

Does managed money predict price?

On its own, not in the short term. Across 23 major commodity markets and 23,741 market-weeks since 2006, the weekly change in the Managed Money net position matched the direction of the previous week's price move 68.4% of the time and the next week's price move 49.7% of the time. Funds follow price. The more useful information is how stretched the position is relative to its own history.

What is the managed money equivalent for currencies and stock indices?

Leveraged Funds in the Traders in Financial Futures report. It includes hedge funds and other money managers, but a large part of its position is relative-value and basis trading, so it tracks price direction much less closely than commodity Managed Money does.

Where can I find managed money positions for gold?

The CFTC publishes them every Friday in the Disaggregated COT report, as raw position counts. COTInsight shows gold's Managed Money position with z-score, COT Index, regime and full participant breakdown on its gold market page and in the dashboard. Our guide to COT historical data explains what it takes to build the history from the raw files.

What is managed money spreading?

Spreading is the amount of a trader's position held as offsetting longs and shorts in different delivery months of the same commodity. It is a bet on the shape of the futures curve rather than on direction, so it is excluded from the net position. In natural gas it accounted for 34.6% of all open interest on September 29, 2026.

Summary

Managed Money is the cleanest speculator series the CFTC publishes for commodities, and it is the number behind almost every "funds are long" headline. Read it for what it is: a lagged record of trend-following and discretionary fund positioning, on a scale that only makes sense against its own history. The direction of this week's change says little. How far the position has stretched, who holds it, how much of it is spreading, and whether price still agrees with it say a great deal more.

If you want to put that reading to work, our pillar guide on how to trade the COT report walks through the full process from release to decision.