Lesson 4: COT Positioning: Who Holds Gold Futures

Lesson 4 of 10 · about 8 minutes · course overview

Every Friday the CFTC publishes who holds COMEX gold futures as of Tuesday. It is the only public, regular look at institutional positioning in gold, and pros read it for crowding, not for direction.

The groups that matter

• Managed money: hedge funds and CTAs. Trend-following and macro funds; their net position swings the most and tends to rise with price.
• Swap dealers: mostly bullion banks hedging client business. Structurally net short; usually the mirror image of managed money.
• Producers/merchants: miners, refiners and fabricators hedging physical business.
• Other reportables and non-reportables: other large traders and smaller positions.

Percentiles, not raw numbers

A net long of 150,000 contracts means little on its own. Rank it against the last five years: at the 95th percentile funds are as long as they have been in years, so there are fewer new buyers left and many holders who could sell on a shock. At the 5th percentile the opposite applies. The heatmap does this ranking every week.

Limits

• The data is three days old when published, and extremes can last for months.
• Positions in London OTC, options and ETFs are not in the report.
• Use crowding as risk context: when funds are extremely long, be faster to protect profits on longs and smaller on new ones.

The legacy version of the report is charted on the COT report tracker; the method is in how to read the COT report.