Saxo Bank publishes two weekly Commitment of Traders reports (COT) covering leveraged fund positions in bonds and stock index futures. For IMM currency futures and the VIX, we use the broader measure called non-commercial.
This summary highlights futures positions and changes made by speculators forex, bonds and stocks up until last Tuesday, September 1. During the week. aggressive buying of tech stocks helped lift the S&P 500 by 2.4% to a fresh record. The yield on US 10-year notes held steady while the dollar reached a new low for the cycle last Tuesday.
Speculators made a small reduction in their bearish dollar bets in the week to September 1. The data includes the initial reaction to ECB Lane’s strong euro warning which helped trigger the biggest weekly dollar advance since June. Against ten IMM currency futures and the Dollar Index, the dollar net short was cut by $1 billion to $34 billion. A 7% reduction in the record euro long was somewhat off-set by increased demand for JPY, CAD, AUD and NZD.
The Commitments of Traders (COT) report is issued by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) every Friday at 15:30 EST with data from the week ending the previous Tuesday. The report breaks down the open interest across major futures markets from bonds, stock index, currencies and commodities. The ICE Futures Europe Exchange issues a similar report, also on Fridays, covering Brent crude oil and gas oil.
In commodities, the open interest is broken into the following categories: Producer/Merchant/Processor/User; Swap Dealers; Managed Money and other.
In financials the categories are Dealer/Intermediary; Asset Manager/Institutional; Managed Money and other.
Our focus is primarily on the behaviour of Managed Money traders such as commodity trading advisors (CTA), commodity pool operators (CPO), and unregistered funds.
They are likely to have tight stops and no underlying exposure that is being hedged. This makes them most reactive to changes in fundamental or technical price developments. It provides views about major trends but also helps to decipher when a reversal is looming.
