The Commitment of Traders Report, also known as the COT, is a great resource for traders. It is a great tool to gauge market sentiment from the big players of trading. These big players have large positions in the industry and are thus required by the government to submit reports. Of course, it is important to see what these big players are up to or how they manage their accounts and all that because most likely, they have a great impact on your position. You will get to understand how they play their money and get ideas on what you can do with your own. The Commitment of Traders Report is actually a straight forward report. Let’s discuss the categories of the COT below.

Man looking at traders report

1. Non-Commercial – the non commercial category is where the mixture of individual traders, hedge funds, and financial institutions fall under. Most of them are the traders who want to trade for speculative gains.
2. Commercial – this category refers to the big businesses. They look into Forex trading to hedge.
3. Long – the number of long contracts reported to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fall under this category.
4. Short – just like the long category, the short category refers to the number of short contracts reported to the CFTC.
5. Open interest – this category stands for the number of contracts that haven’t been exercised or delivered.
6. Non-reportable positions – these are the open interest positions of traders that do not meet the reportable requirements of the CFTC.
7. Number of traders – this category features the total number of traders who are required to report positions to the CFTC.
8. Reportable positions – the number of options and futures positions that required to report according to CFTC regulations fall under this column of the COT report.
9. In the center of the COT report, you’ll be able to see the changes from the previous week. It shows up the changes in the Open Interest as well as the Long and Short positions from the week before.

Those are the categories to be found in the Commitment of Traders Report. Once you get into Forex trading, it is highly recommended that you take a look at such reports to get ideas such as trends and profitable opportunities.

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