Gold COT Report Explained: How to Read Managed Money Positions

The gold COT report is the CFTC's weekly breakdown of who holds COMEX gold futures, measured each Tuesday and usually published Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern. The line to read first is managed money's net position: longs minus shorts for the funds and trading advisors the CFTC classes as money managers. On October 13, 2026 it was +107,089 contracts.

AlphaScala stores every weekly gold report since January 3, 2006, 1,085 in all, and each one matches the CFTC's public data. On a 3-year COT index, the October 13 reading scores 45, close to the middle of its range. Over the past 10 years, gold rose a median 5.9% in the 12 weeks after the five most net-short managed-money readings and fell a median 1.3% after the five largest net longs. The median 12-week move across all weeks was a 3.0% gain.

Five readings a side is a small sample, and a wider cut of the same data does not repeat the pattern.

The current week's numbers and the full weekly history, with a CSV download, are on AlphaScala's gold COT report page, which updates after each CFTC release.

How to read the gold COT report in five steps

1. Check the date. Positions are as of Tuesday's close, and the CFTC said it receives the data from reporting firms on Wednesday morning, then corrects and verifies it for release by Friday afternoon. The report for October 13, 2026 positions came out on Friday, October 16. The CFTC's 2026 release schedule marks six releases as delayed by a federal holiday, including Monday, November 16.
2. Pick one report and one format. Gold appears in the Legacy report and the Disaggregated report, and each comes as futures-only or as futures and options combined, with options converted to futures equivalents using exchange-supplied deltas. Futures-only and combined figures differ for the same week, so keep to one. AlphaScala's COT pages use futures-only.
3. Read the net position and its weekly change. Managed money held 124,747 contracts long and 17,658 short on October 13, a net long of 107,089. That was 3,898 lower than a week earlier and the seventh straight weekly decline from +144,747 on August 25, its highest in 52 weeks.
4. Put the net in its own range. The 3-year COT index places the latest net between the lowest (0) and highest (100) weekly reading of the past three years. Managed money scores 45: its 3-year low was +15,103 on October 17, 2023, and its high +219,029 on September 24, 2024.
5. Scale it by open interest. Open interest, the number of contracts not yet closed out, was 396,345, so the managed-money net long equals 27.0% of it. The ratio makes weeks of different market size comparable: on September 12, 2017, the largest managed-money net long of the past 10 years (+253,517) equaled 43.7% of open interest of 580,606.

Here is the full October 13, 2026 report in both layouts.

Source: CFTC Commitments of Traders, futures only, COMEX gold (contract code 088691, 100 troy ounces per contract), positions as of October 13, 2026. Spreading, the matched long and short positions a single trader holds, cancels out of every net. The CFTC reports it in a separate column for non-commercial traders and for every Disaggregated group except producer/merchant, and those rows' long and short figures leave it out. The Legacy commercial row has no spreading column, so its long and short figures include swap dealers' spreads.

The managed-money net of 107,089 contracts is 10.7 million troy ounces of gold. At the October 13 spot close of $4,157.95 (TwelveData XAU/USD), that is about $44.5 billion.

Legacy vs Disaggregated: how gold's trader groups fit together

The Legacy report splits reportable traders into two groups. A trader is "commercial" if it uses gold futures for hedging as defined in CFTC Regulation 1.3, generally declared on CFTC Form 40; every other reportable trader is "non-commercial." Legacy data runs back to January 15, 1986, according to the CFTC. AlphaScala's COT pages label the non-commercial group "large speculators."

The Disaggregated report, first published on September 4, 2009, splits the same traders four ways, with history back to June 13, 2006. The CFTC said it does not keep a history of trader classifications, so the earlier years use later classifications, an approach it said "diminishes the data's accuracy as it goes further back in time."

Managed money

A money manager in the report is "a registered commodity trading advisor (CTA); a registered commodity pool operator (CPO); or an unregistered fund identified by CFTC," according to the CFTC's Disaggregated explanatory notes, and hedge funds are included "regardless of whether they are registered." On October 13, 75 managed-money traders held long gold positions and 21 held shorts.

Swap dealers

A swap dealer "deals primarily in swaps for a commodity and uses the futures markets to manage or hedge the risk associated with those swaps transactions," the CFTC said, and its counterparties "may be speculative traders, like hedge funds, or traditional commercial clients." Swap dealers held the largest short of any Disaggregated group in gold on October 13: 238,070 contracts, against 13,976 long. The report does not say what each position offsets, because, in the CFTC's words, "CFTC staff does not know specific reasons for traders' positions."

Producers, merchants, processors and users

This group covers entities that predominantly engage in "the production, processing, packing or handling of a physical commodity" and use futures to hedge those activities. It was net short 18,437 contracts on October 13. The CFTC classifies traders rather than trades, so all of such a firm's gold positions land in this group, "regardless of whether the position is for hedging or speculation."

Other reportables and small traders

Other reportables are the reportable traders the CFTC does not place in any of the other three groups; they were net long 100,790. A trader's whole gold position is reported once it holds 200 contracts or more in any single futures month or option expiration, the level set in 17 CFR 15.03. Non-reportable positions are whatever is left of open interest after the reportable positions are subtracted. On October 13, 289 reportable traders held 87.2% of the long side and 95.9% of the short side; the CFTC said reportable positions usually make up 70 to 90 percent of open interest in any given market.

How the two reports add up

The CFTC said the legacy commercial category "has always included" producers, merchants, processors and users, and "has also included swap dealers." The non-commercial category's two parts "are separately reported as 'money managers' and 'other reportables'" in the Disaggregated report. In the gold numbers, the nets match to the contract.

AlphaScala checked both equations against every weekly gold report since June 13, 2006, and they hold in all 1,062. The non-commercial long and short columns also equal the two Disaggregated groups added together. The commercial columns do not, because of spreading. Legacy reports spreading only for non-commercial traders, so swap dealers' spreads land on both sides of the commercial row: in the October 13 report, legacy commercial longs of 54,419 equal producer longs (18,386) plus swap dealer longs (13,976) plus swap dealer spreads (22,057).

For the same week, a gold headline about "speculators" can therefore mean +207,879 contracts (Legacy) or +107,089 (managed money). The gap is the other reportables group.

The silver COT report uses the same Disaggregated layout. Financial futures such as currencies and Treasuries use a third format, Traders in Financial Futures, and the forex COT positioning tool headlines the Legacy large-speculator net for the 8 major currency futures.

What gold did after the most extreme managed-money readings

AlphaScala took the 522 weekly managed-money net positions from October 18, 2016 to October 13, 2026 and picked the five largest net longs and the five most net-short readings. Each pick is at least 13 weeks from a more extreme one, so no two 12-week windows overlap, although one long run of positioning can still supply two picks. Gold moves use TwelveData XAU/USD spot daily closes, measured from the Friday after each positions date, the CFTC's usual release day, to the close four and 12 weeks later.

The five largest managed-money net longs, 2016 to 2026

The five most net-short readings, 2016 to 2026

For comparison, across all weeks in the decade, gold's median move was +0.7% over four weeks (56% of 518 windows higher) and +3.0% over 12 weeks (66% of 510 windows higher).

After the five largest net longs, gold was lower 12 weeks later three times. The larger of the two exceptions is January 21, 2025: managed money was net long 215,869 contracts, and gold gained 20.0% over the next 12 weeks to $3,326.27 on April 18, 2025. The February 2020 reading was followed by an 8.8% fall over four weeks, to $1,498.24 on March 20, 2020, and then by a recovery to $1,743.00 by May 15.

After the five most net-short readings, gold was higher 12 weeks later four times, but lower over the first four weeks in four of the five cases. The first and last rows belong to the same stretch: managed money was net short in 25 weeks of 2018, and the July 10 reading came 13 weeks before the October 9 low. In the whole decade, it was net short in only 42 of 522 weeks.

The three-day gap between the data and the release

In four of the five net-short weeks, gold had already risen between the Tuesday positions date and the Friday release: 2.4% in October 2018, 1.9% in September 2022, 1.1% in April 2019 and 3.8% in October 2023. Measured from Tuesday instead of Friday, all four show four-week gains, of 3.1%, 1.5%, 0.2% and 5.8%. Measured from Friday, the date a reader could first see the numbers, three of those four show small losses.

The wider sample does not back a simple rule

Using every week instead of the 10 extremes points the other way for net longs. The 49 weeks with a 3-year managed-money COT index of 90 or higher were followed by a median 12-week gain of 6.3%, with gold higher in 78% of them. The 427 mid-range weeks (index 11 to 89) with a full 12 weeks of prices had a median of 2.9%, and the 34 weeks at 10 or below had 2.0%.

Those groups are thinner than their counts suggest. The 49 high-index weeks fall in three periods. Thirty-seven of them come between March 12, 2024 and February 11, 2025, while gold rose from $2,157.99 to $2,898.34, and 11 between August 2019 and February 2020. The 34 low-index weeks also fall in three periods, and 33 of them are in 2018 and 2022. Their 12-week windows overlap, so neighboring weeks repeat much of the same price move.

Over the full decade, gold rose 229%, from $1,262.84 on October 18, 2016 to $4,157.95 on October 13, 2026. That works out to a compound 2.8% per 12 weeks, close to the 3.0% median for all weeks. The record describes what happened after each reading, and none of it is a trading rule.

Gold futures are leveraged, so losses can exceed the margin deposited; the position sizing formula works through sizing a trade from its stop. The trading checklist logs the COT report's as-of date as a pre-trade check, and the COT reports hub lists the same data for 21 futures markets. The figures in this guide come from the report for positions on October 13, 2026, which the CFTC released on October 16.

FAQ

What is the gold COT report?

It is the CFTC's weekly Commitments of Traders breakdown for COMEX gold futures (contract code 088691, 100 troy ounces each). It shows long and short positions by trader group as of Tuesday. The Legacy version splits reportable traders into commercial and non-commercial, with small traders left as non-reportable; the Disaggregated version splits reportable traders into producer/merchant, swap dealers, managed money and other reportables.

When is the gold COT report released?

The CFTC generally publishes it on Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, using positions from the close on the preceding Tuesday. The CFTC said federal holidays may delay a release by one or two days. Its 2026 schedule marks six releases as delayed, each moved to a Monday, including November 16, 2026.

What does managed money mean in the gold COT report?

Managed money is the Disaggregated report's group for registered commodity trading advisors and pool operators, along with hedge funds and other unregistered funds the CFTC identifies. Its net position is long contracts minus short contracts. In COMEX gold it was +107,089 contracts on October 13, 2026, equal to 27.0% of open interest.

Why are swap dealers net short gold?

The CFTC defines swap dealers as firms that deal mainly in swaps on a commodity and use futures to manage or hedge the risk of those swaps, and the report does not show the swaps themselves. The CFTC also said its staff does not know the specific reasons for traders' positions. Swap dealers were net short 224,094 gold contracts on October 13, 2026.

What is the COT index?

The COT index places the latest net position within its own range: (net minus lowest net) divided by (highest net minus lowest net), times 100, over a lookback of three years on AlphaScala's pages. A reading of 0 is the 3-year low and 100 the 3-year high. Gold's managed-money COT index was 45 on October 13, 2026.

Does a record net long in gold mean the price will fall?

AlphaScala's 10-year record does not show that. After the five largest managed-money net longs since October 2016, gold was lower 12 weeks later three times and higher twice, including a 20.0% gain after the January 21, 2025 reading. Across all 49 weeks with a 3-year COT index of 90 or above, the median 12-week move was a 6.3% gain.