The COT Report in Forex: A Record, Not a Signal

By Uladzimir Leuchankou, founder of Signal2Forex · Written on 6 November 2026, a few hours before the next report

What is the COT report in forex? Most guides call it a sentiment indicator that shows where the big money is going. I suppose that is an answer too. But for me the COT report forex traders open each Friday is a record. It shows who held which futures positions on Tuesday — and it says nothing about next week.

The Commitments of Traders report — COT for short — is a weekly table from the CFTC, the US futures regulator. It splits the open positions of each futures market into three groups. In the report for 27 October 2026 large speculators were net short 143,894 euro contracts. This is the largest speculative short in the euro since January 2016.

Contracts on Tuesday 27 October 2026. Net is long minus short. Source: CFTC, Legacy report, futures only, Euro FX on the CME.

Add the three numbers and you get zero. This is the first thing to see in the table — every long contract has a short contract on the other side. So when someone says the commercials are buying the euro, the same sentence says the speculators are selling it. One fact, two descriptions.

Tuesday, Friday, Monday

The CFTC counts positions at the close on Tuesday and publishes them on Friday at 15:30 New York time. This is 20:30 GMT in winter and 19:30 GMT while the US is on summer time. When a US federal holiday falls in the week, the report comes later — the CFTC release schedule lists every date.

So the freshest COT data forex traders can get is already three days old. By the next Friday, just before the new report, it is ten days old. Does a ten-day-old number help with a trade you open on Thursday? For an entry on the H1 chart it does not. For knowing how crowded one side already is, it does — and this is the only job I give it.

One more thing about the source. Spot forex has no central exchange, so nobody can publish the positions of all spot traders. The report covers currency futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where one euro contract is 125,000 euros. The Commitment of Traders forex picture is a sample — large and regulated, but still a part of the market.

This table is older than most of its readers. It has existed as a monthly report since 1962 and as a weekly one since 2000. Whether you search for the forex COT report or the COT forex report, you land on the same CFTC file. If you want to trust a number, you need to know where it is born.

One row, four numbers

Search Console shows me what people type before they land on this page. The most common long question is how to read COT report forex rows. The row itself is short. For the euro on 27 October 2026 the non-commercial group held 230,646 long contracts and 374,540 short contracts.

The first number to take is the net — long minus short. 230,646 minus 374,540 gives −143,894. The second is the change from the week before. On 20 October the net was −134,524, so speculators added 9,370 contracts to the short side. The third is the share of open interest. Open interest — all contracts that exist in this market — was 868,188, so the speculative shorts alone were 43% of it.

The fourth number is money, and most tables skip it. 143,894 contracts of 125,000 euros is about 18 billion euros — $20.1 billion at the Federal Reserve rate of 1.1199 for that Tuesday. On one futures contract a move of one pip is $12.50. If pips are new to you, I explain them with money examples in the pip guide.

The same steps answer the wider question of how to read Commitment of Traders report pages for any currency. Only the direction needs care. Yen, Swiss franc and Canadian dollar futures are quoted as the currency against the dollar. On 27 October speculators were net long 101,591 yen contracts after adding 31,713 in one week. This is a position for a lower USD/JPY.

Ten months of euro positions

One week says little. I took the 52 weekly reports from 4 November 2025 to 27 October 2026 and put the speculative net next to EUR/USD. On 10 February 2026 speculators were net long 180,305 contracts and the pair stood at 1.1898. This was the most crowded long of the last three years.

Then the long side emptied. By 17 March the net was down to 21,132 — it lost 84,012 contracts in a single week. I think a large part of that week is the March contract expiring. Open interest fell from 969,374 to 755,789 at the same time. If one weekly change looks huge, you need to check the calendar before you believe it.

From July the group has been net short. In October the short grew from 63,256 to 143,894 contracts in four weeks. Over the whole move from February the net changed by 324,199 contracts, and EUR/USD fell from 1.1898 to 1.1199. This is 699 pips — about $6,990 on one standard lot of 100,000 units, $69.90 on a 0.01 lot, and about 70 cents on a 0.01 lot of a cent account.

Did the report predict that fall? I do not think so. Speculators sold while the price was already falling. Positions and price moved together, week after week. Behind both stands the gap between the Fed and the European Central Bank — I describe how a central bank’s lean moves a currency in the hawkish vs dovish article. The report recorded the trend after it had started.

Extremes without magic

There is another habit to drop. Most COT analysis forex pages call the commercials smart money and the speculators a crowd that is wrong at every top. By the euro table this year it is not so. Speculators turned short in July and the pair is lower today. Commercials were long all the way down — they hold the other side because someone has to.

What about extremes? The usual tool is the COT index, made popular by Stephen Briese in his book The Commitments of Traders Bible. It places this week’s net inside its own range of the last three years — zero is the lowest point and one hundred the highest. For the euro the range runs from −143,894 to +180,305, so today’s reading is zero. A week at −60,000 would read 26.

A reading of zero looks like a reason to buy. So I checked four euro extremes against the price thirteen weeks later, using Federal Reserve rates. After the short extreme of 31 March 2015 EUR/USD rose 3.8%. The short extreme of 29 October 2024 was followed by a fall of 3.4%. After the long extreme of 10 February 2026 the pair fell 1.4%, and after the short extreme of 28 July 2026 it fell another 1.8%.

Two turned, two kept going. Four cases are a small sample and I would not build a rule on them. But they are enough to stop me from buying the euro only because the index says zero. An extreme tells you the trade is crowded. If the price turns, many traders have to close at the same time and the move can be fast. Will it turn? The report does not say.

A weekly COT report forex routine

How to use COT report in forex trading, then? For me the answer is a short routine once a week, after the Friday release or on Saturday morning. Five steps, ten minutes. It does not give entries. It gives you a picture of who is already in the trade.

The first step — open the CFTC COT report forex traders need, the Legacy futures-only file for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, on the CFTC page, and find your currency. The second — write down the non-commercial net and its change from last week. And the third — compare the net with its own three-year range. Now you know whether one side is crowded.

The fourth step — put the price of the same weeks next to it. If the net and the price move together, the report only confirms the trend you already see. If the price makes a new low and the short stops growing, sellers may be running out. This is worth a note in your journal and no more than that.

The fifth step — look inside the speculators. In the Traders in Financial Futures version of the same Tuesday, leveraged funds were net short 71,574 euro contracts while asset managers were still net long 173,249. Hedge funds move fast and asset managers hold for years. So the forex COT data can show a record short and a large long in one market on one day.

The routine is the same for other pairs. On 27 October speculators were net short 128,315 contracts in the Australian dollar and 79,414 in the pound. I have not checked their past extremes the way I checked the euro, so I will not tell you what those numbers mean for next month.

Robots and a weekly file

I am an engineer and I build trading robots, so you might expect a COT filter inside them. There is none. The 28 expert advisors of our Forex V Portfolio trade the H1 chart on 14 pairs. A parameter that changes once a week with a three-day delay cannot time an H1 order. MetaTrader has no built-in COT feed either — the numbers would have to be imported from a file.

I do not know whether a COT filter would have helped these robots in October. I have not run that backtest and I will not guess. What I can say is simpler. A weekly file belongs to weekly decisions — which pairs are crowded, where a turn would be violent, how much size to carry into a week like this one. If you trade by hand on daily charts, this is where the report earns its ten minutes.

The next Friday

The next report is due today, 6 November 2026, at 20:30 GMT, with positions for Tuesday 3 November. EUR/USD closed near 1.1220 on 5 November, almost where it stood on the last report date. Did the short grow again, or did some sellers take profit? I will know tonight, and so will you.

A record of Tuesday’s positions, a three-day delay, the net, its weekly change, its place in three years and the price next to it — this is all the report gives, and it is enough. The more Fridays you read it without acting on it, the steadier you are in the week when one number looks dramatic.