Other Reportables is a CFTC reportable-trader classification used in both the Disaggregated Commitments of Traders (COT) report and the Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) report. In each family, it is a residual category: a reportable trader is placed there when CFTC staff does not place it in one of that family’s other three reportable categories. The shared label therefore does not mean that the underlying participant mix is the same across the two report families.
Residual category, different frameworks
In the Disaggregated COT, the other three reportable categories are Producer/Merchant/Processor/User, Swap Dealer and Managed Money. In TFF, they are Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional and Leveraged Funds. TFF places Other Reportables on the buy side and states that traders in this category mostly use the markets to hedge business risks; examples include corporate treasuries, central banks, smaller banks, mortgage originators and credit unions. Those examples should not be transferred to the Disaggregated COT category. Other Reportables is defined within each report family, not as one universal economic type.
Classification applies to the trader, not to the motive of every individual position. CFTC staff use Form 40 information and, where appropriate, other information about market activities, then assign reportable traders according to predominant activity. Multi-functional organizations and separately reportable entities can therefore be classified differently, and classifications can change as activities, traded markets, client bases or information available to the Commission change. A long or short balance in Other Reportables should not automatically be labeled speculative, hedging, bullish or bearish.
What the published positions actually show
For Other Reportables, both Disaggregated COT and TFF report long, short and spreading positions. Spreading is a computed amount based on 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. Any residual exposure is reported in the long or short column, and inter-market spreads are not included in this spreading measure. Because spreading can be a partial activity, the same trader can appear in an outright long or short trader count and in the spreading trader count, so column-level trader counts should not be added as though they represented mutually exclusive traders.
The classification is also separate from report format: Disaggregated COT and TFF are published in futures-only and futures-and-options-combined forms. For research, the deeper issue is composition through time. Changes in Other Reportables can reflect changes in positions as well as changes in classification. There is an additional historical limitation: when the CFTC constructed historical Disaggregated and TFF data back to June 2006, it stated that it did not maintain a history of large-trader classifications and therefore used then-recent classifications to backcast earlier positions. The CFTC cautioned that this reduced classification accuracy further back in the historical series. Other Reportables is therefore most useful when the analyst knows which COT family is being examined, what the category can represent there, and whether historical composition is being assumed to be more stable than the underlying methodology supports.