Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) is a weekly Commitments of Traders report family published by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for financial contracts. It divides reportable open interest into four trader classifications: Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional, Leveraged Funds, and Other Reportables. Nonreportable Positions are shown separately and are not a fifth TFF trader category. The important distinction is that TFF uses its own classification framework rather than subdividing the Commercial and Non-Commercial categories of the Legacy COT Report.
What the classifications actually mean
TFF organizes reportable traders by their functional role and predominant business purpose. Dealer/Intermediary represents the sell side, including firms that intermediate client activity and manage risks associated with financial products. Asset Manager/Institutional includes institutional investors and portfolio managers; Leveraged Funds typically includes hedge funds, commodity trading advisors, commodity pool operators and other leveraged money-management businesses; Other Reportables is the residual reportable category for traders not placed in the first three groups. Under current CFTC methodology, a trader classified for TFF is placed in the same category across commodities.
The categories classify traders, not the motive behind every position they hold. Classification is based on business-purpose information reported on Form 40 and reviewed by CFTC staff for reasonableness, but the Commission does not know the specific reason for every position. A Leveraged Fund position, for example, can reflect outright risk-taking, arbitrage or hedging of another exposure. Category membership therefore should not be translated mechanically into “speculative,” “hedging,” bullish or bearish intent.
How the report should be read
TFF generally describes Tuesday open interest and is released on Friday at 3:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time; holidays can alter the schedule. A contract market appears in COT reporting when at least 20 reportable traders hold positions at or above the applicable reporting levels. TFF is published in Futures Only and Futures and Options Combined formats. In the combined report, options are converted to futures-equivalent positions using delta factors. All four reportable categories show long, short and spreading positions. Spreading is a computed amount of offsetting long and short exposure; importantly, inter-market spreads are not included in that calculation.
TFF is not a disaggregation of Legacy COT data. CFTC documentation states that traders placed in any of the four TFF categories may come from either the Legacy Commercial or Non-Commercial group, so Dealer/Intermediary should not be treated as synonymous with Commercial and Leveraged Funds should not be treated as synonymous with Non-Commercial. Historical research also requires care: when the CFTC constructed TFF history back to June 2006, it noted that it did not maintain a history of large-trader classifications and therefore used then-recent classifications to backcast earlier positions, reducing classification accuracy farther back in the series. TFF is consequently most useful as a structured view of who holds reportable financial-futures exposure, not as a standalone directional signal.