Nonreportable Positions are the long and short amounts of open interest in a Commitments of Traders (COT) report that remain after the published reportable-position totals are subtracted from total open interest. They are a residual measurement, not a trader classification. “Nonreportable” therefore describes how positions enter the COT reporting framework; it does not identify their holders as retail, speculative, commercial, institutional or any other economic type.
A residual, not simply “small traders”
The shorthand “small traders” can be misleading because CFTC reporting levels determine whether a trader becomes reportable, not whether only the above-threshold slice of that trader's position is counted. If, at the daily market close, a reporting firm has a trader at or above the applicable reporting level in any single futures month or option expiration, the firm reports that trader's entire position across all futures and options expiration months in that commodity, regardless of the size of the individual component positions. Nonreportable Positions are therefore what remains outside the aggregate reportable long and short totals; they are not a clean bucket of uniformly small accounts.
The distinction also separates Nonreportable Positions from reportable trader classifications. Legacy reports classify reportable positions as Commercial and Non-Commercial. Disaggregated reports use Producer/Merchant/Processor/User, Swap Dealer, Managed Money and Other Reportables; Traders in Financial Futures uses Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional, Leveraged Funds and Other Reportables; and the Supplemental report includes Index Trader alongside its Commercial and Non-Commercial reportable categories. Nonreportable Positions are shown separately. Their published long and short values can be netted for analysis, but that net does not reveal the number, economic type or motive of the underlying traders.
Why the construction changes interpretation
Total long open interest equals total short open interest, but the nonreportable long and short residuals need not be equal because reportable long and short totals can differ. In Futures-and-Options-Combined reports, option positions are converted to futures-equivalent amounts using delta factors and combined with futures positions. Nonreportable values in that format therefore sit on the same delta-adjusted futures-equivalent basis rather than being directly identical in construction to Futures-Only figures.
For research, Nonreportable Positions measure exposure outside the published reportable totals, not the behavior of a stable participant cohort. When a trader crosses a reporting level, its entire commodity position can enter the reportable totals; the CFTC can also change reporting levels over time. Week-to-week or historical shifts in the residual can therefore reflect changes in reportability as well as changes in positions. COT reports generally describe Tuesday's open interest and are normally published Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, although holidays or exceptional publication disruptions can alter that schedule. The series is consequently a dated positioning snapshot, not real-time order flow.