trademagic guides
The COT report, explained properly
Every Friday the CFTC publishes who is positioned where in the futures market: dealers, asset managers, leveraged funds. It is one of the few windows into positioning that exists in any market, and one of the most misused.
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What the report actually is
The Commitments of Traders report is a weekly census of open futures positions, collected as of Tuesday and published Friday. For FX the relevant slice is currency futures at CME, covered best by the Traders in Financial Futures report, which breaks holders into dealers and intermediaries, asset managers and institutions, leveraged funds, and other reportables. Because currency futures track spot closely, the report doubles as the cleanest public proxy for who is long and short the major currencies.
Why positioning moves price
A position is future flow in waiting: everyone who is already long is a future seller. When leveraged funds crowd one side of a currency and the fundamental story stumbles, the exit is narrow, and price moves are amplified by the unwind rather than the news itself. Positioning extremes do not time reversals, but they grade the fragility of a trend, size the fuel available for a squeeze, and flag when good news stops moving a market because everyone already bought it.
How quants actually use it
- Normalised, not raw: net positions as a percentile of their own multi-year history, or scaled by open interest, so "extreme" means something across eras.
- Rate of change: fast accumulation often carries more signal than the level itself.
- Cross-checked: positioning against price action, open interest, options structure, and the macro calendar. Alone it is context; blended, it becomes an input with teeth.
- Lag-aware: Tuesday's data arrives Friday, so any systematic use must be tested against what was knowable when.
That last point is where hobbyist use usually breaks. Getting the alignment, normalisation, and blending right across decades of files is unglamorous data engineering, which is precisely the layer trademagic's models industrialise: COT and open interest sit alongside tape-driven flow, macro surprise, futures and options structure, and carry in the 900+ feeds behind every certified signal. Our indicators essay explains why we build on driver data like this rather than chart arithmetic.
# You could parse the CFTC files, lag-align them, normalise years of
# history, and blend them with flow and macro state. Or consume the models
# that already trained on all of it:
curl -s "https://trademagic.ai/api/ext/v1/signals" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer tp_live_YOUR_KEY"
# {"signals":[{"pair":"AUDUSD","side":"buy","entry":"0.66120000",
# "sl":"0.65850000","tp":"0.66680000","rr":"2.0700","eta":"2-4h",
# "status":"fresh", ...}], "window_days":14}Start with a free trial
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Frequently asked questions
Where do I get COT data for free?
Directly from the CFTC website, published every Friday afternoon US time with Tuesday's positions, including full historical archives. Several free chart sites plot it; serious use means parsing the raw files yourself.
Is the COT report a timing tool?
No. It is condition and context: it tells you how crowded a trade is, not when the crowd turns. Positioning extremes can extend for months. Quants use it as one input among many, never as a standalone trigger.
Which COT report matters for FX?
The Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) report covers currency futures at CME with categories that map to real participant types: dealers, asset managers, and leveraged funds. The legacy report's commercial and non-commercial split works too but blurs who is who.
Does trademagic expose raw COT data through the API?
No. The API serves the models' output: quantified signals. COT and open interest are among the 900+ input feeds the models are trained on, alongside flow, macro surprise, futures and options structure, and carry.
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Create an account and your API key is minutes away.