The Commitment of Traders (COT) report is a report by the Commodities Futures Traders Commission (CFTC) every Friday that reports the details about different players positions in the futures market. The report does this by stating the net short and net long positions for different types of traders (e.g., speculators vs. hedgers). The COT report is a way of analyzing market sentiment by measuring the number of bears and bulls that there are in the market, giving you a quantifiable number to the overall markets opinion.
One way to trade with the COT report is that reversals tend to happen when there are extreme short and extreme long positions. Nobody will be left to buy if everyone is already long a position, and nobody will be left to sell to if everyone is already short a position.
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