Commitment of Traders (COT)

cMind ships a built-in Commitment of Traders report — the weekly CFTC breakdown of who is long and short in the U.S. futures market (commercial hedgers, large speculators, funds), with interactive historical charts, a normalized COT index, an authenticated REST API for cBots and MCP tools for AI clients. Data comes straight from the CFTC public Socrata datasets — no API key, no aggregator. Like the economic calendar it is a decoupled module that can be disabled with zero effect on the trading core.

What it gives you

• All three report families, futures-only and futures+options combined:
  • Legacy — Non-Commercial (large speculators), Commercial (hedgers), Non-Reportable.
  • Disaggregated — Producer/Merchant, Swap Dealers, Managed Money, Other Reportables.
  • Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) — Dealer, Asset Manager, Leveraged Funds, Other Reportables.
• A curated market catalog — FX majors, gold/silver/copper, crude & natural gas, Treasuries, equity indices, crypto and the main grains/softs — each mapped to its stable CFTC contract code and, where unambiguous, to a tradeable symbol (e.g. Euro FX → EURUSD, Gold → XAUUSD).
• The COT index (0–100) — where the current speculator net position sits inside its historical range (default ~3-year lookback). Readings near the extremes flag crowded positioning that often precedes a reversal; the report labels a long extreme (≥80) or short extreme (≤20).
• Point-in-time correctness. A weekly report is measured on a Tuesday but only becomes public the following Friday; every read honours that release instant, so a backtested positioning signal never sees a report before it was published (no look-ahead).

Using the page

Open Commitment of Traders from the left navigation. Pick a market, a report type (Legacy / Disaggregated / Financial) and toggle Futures + options to switch between futures-only and the combined variant. The page shows:

• Net positioning over time — an interactive line chart of each trader category's net position (long − short) across the history window.
• COT index — a line chart of the 0–100 index, with the latest reading and its extreme label.
• Latest snapshot — a table of long / short / net / % of open interest per trader category, plus total open interest and the report date.

Each chart carries zoom in / out (and reset) toolbar buttons, and you can drag across the time axis to zoom. Export CSV downloads the full weekly history of the selected market and report type as a spreadsheet-ready file. Use Compare markets to overlay several markets on a single chart — the comparison charts plot each selected market's speculator net position and COT index side by side, so you can read cross-market positioning at a glance.

How the data flows

The database is the cache. A weekly ingestion worker pulls the six CFTC datasets for the tracked markets, upserts the market catalog and appends each new report idempotently (re-running never duplicates a snapshot). In addition, data is loaded on demand: the first time a market is requested it is fetched from the CFTC source and stored, and every subsequent request is served straight from the database. The cache refreshes as new weekly reports are released — once the newest stored report is more than a week old the next request transparently pulls and appends the latest data (throttled so the source is never hammered). The first load back-fills several years of history; a source outage degrades to serving the best cached data. Everything runs out of the box with no key; an optional Socrata app token only raises the rate limit.

Configuration

All keys live under App:Cot (see feature toggles and white-label owner settings):

Key	Default	Purpose
IngestionEnabled	true	Whether the weekly ingestion worker runs.
PollInterval	6h	How often the worker polls the CFTC datasets.
BackfillYears	5	Years of history pulled on the first run.
ReconcileLookbackWeeks	4	Recent weeks re-synced each cycle to catch revisions.
SocrataAppToken	—	Optional token that raises the anonymous rate limit.
CotIndexLookbackWeeks	156	Weekly reports used as the COT-index range (~3 years).

Gating

Visibility is a two-tier gate, identical to the economic calendar: the white-label hard gate App:Branding:EnableCot (build-level) and the runtime feature toggle App:Features:Cot. With either off the nav link, page, REST API and MCP tools all disappear (the API returns 404). Because the data source is keyless, there is no data-source-key gate — enabled means visible.

For developers

• Domain: Core.Cot — CotMarket and CotReport aggregates, the CotPositions value object, the CotIndexCalculator domain service, and the ICotReports / ICotSource ports.
• Infrastructure: Infrastructure.Cot — the CftcSocrataSource anti-corruption parser, the rate gate, the append-only write service, the read side and the weekly ingestion worker (EF cot schema).
• cBot & AI access: the COT cBot API (REST, market:read JWT) and the MCP tools CotMarkets, CotLatest, CotHistory, CotHealth.