The Disaggregated COT Report is a weekly Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commitments of Traders report family for physical commodity markets. It divides reportable open interest among four classifications—Producer/Merchant/Processor/User, Swap Dealers, Managed Money, and Other Reportables—providing finer participant segmentation than the Legacy COT Report’s commercial/non-commercial split. It is published in two report formats, Futures Only and Futures and Options Combined; those are formats of the same classification family, not separate COT families. Nonreportable Positions are shown separately rather than treated as a fifth reportable trader category.
What the report actually measures
The report generally describes each Tuesday’s open interest for markets where at least 20 traders hold positions at or above CFTC reporting levels. Current Disaggregated reports cover physical commodity markets grouped into agriculture, petroleum and products, natural gas and products, electricity, and metals and other; financial futures use the separate Traders in Financial Futures framework. COT reports are generally released Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time using the immediately preceding Tuesday’s data, although holidays and other disruptions can shift the schedule. In the combined format, option positions are converted to delta-adjusted futures-equivalent amounts and combined with futures positions.
Position structure also differs by category. Producer/Merchant/Processor/User positions are reported as long or short, while Swap Dealers, Managed Money, and Other Reportables also have a spreading column. Spreading is a computed amount of offsetting long and short positions: offsetting futures in different calendar months, or offsetting futures and options in the same or different calendar months in the combined report. Residual exposure remains in the long or short column, and inter-market spreads are not counted. The spreading column is therefore a reporting calculation, not a direct statement of a trader’s strategy or directional conviction.
Classification is not motive
The most important interpretation boundary is that the CFTC classifies traders, not individual trades. Classification is based principally on the trader’s predominant business purpose reported on Form 40 and reviewed by CFTC staff, who may use other information when assigning or revising a category. The CFTC does not know the specific reason for every position. A trader classified as Producer/Merchant/Processor/User therefore has all of its positions in that commodity included in that category whether a particular position is hedging or speculative, and a trader may have different classifications across different commodities. Category totals can also change when a trader is reclassified, so week-to-week moves are not necessarily pure measures of new buying or selling.
The historical series has an additional point-in-time limitation. The CFTC began publishing the Disaggregated COT Report on September 4, 2009, but later released historical data back to June 13, 2006. Because it did not maintain a historical record of large-trader classifications, more recent classifications were used to classify earlier positions—a process the CFTC calls backcasting. The agency notes that this reduces classification accuracy farther back in time, while still describing the series as reasonably representative over the period. For research, the practical distinction is important: pre-launch Disaggregated data are reconstructed history, not evidence that each historical category assignment had been known and recorded contemporaneously.