COT Data Tool Manual

Welcome to CFTC COT Data Signals and Charts Tool! Getting Started

The COT tool is an ecosystem for financial research using COT Data Intelligence. This is not a signal provider but has some elements of it. Cot Data is the perfect tool to show us the trend direction. Ask any Algorithmic trader developers what its the most difficult part about developing a system and he will answer will: “Define trade direction” and as we all know:

The Trend is your Friend!

The Interface | TRY THE TOOL HERE

The Tool will always open with the “Triggered Signals” selected, this tab shows you what are the opportunities we have for the current week, this does not invalidate the past week opportunities. So if you are not looking to make a deeper analysis and want only to get the signals, this is the place where you should go.

Instrument Selector

Choose Symbol: Instrument name that you are going to use on your analysis.

Dates: Dates of all releases of COT Data and where you can access data from that date, signals, and charts.

Signals Summary

This box will summarize for you the actual situation of the symbol you selected in “Instrument Selector”. One scenario that confuses some users, but it’s completely normal and expected, is when you see “Short” in the “Net Position” field and you see some bullish signal in other fields. Have in mind that a bullish trend starts when you have an extreme in short positions. A trend can’t change to bullish from bullish, the natural path is changing from bearish to bullish and vice-versa.

• COT Index: This will tell you about possible Top or Bottom
• Movement Index: The rate of change in the COT Index, tells you when a trend is resuming after a pullback.
• RSI: Relative Strenght Index on top of Commercials Net positions showing you short-term opportunities.
• Stochastics: On top of Non-Commercials Net positions showing you short-term opportunities. Very reliable.
• Open Interest: Will display a signal when we have an extreme on open interest(positions opened), this is the most powerful cot signal
• Net Position: Tells you which side Non-Commercials are

Players Positioning

This little chart gives us at a glance an idea of how the players are positioned in the markets. But one warning here, do not base your analysis solely on this, this is comparing last net position only, this is just to give you an idea how players are, but you need to check the size of positions and open interest too.

Charts

Here you can visualize the data and make your own analysis. There are 5 charts inside “Charts table”

1. Net positions: The Green area is the Non-commercials net positions while blue is Commercials. The red histogram is the difference and will tell you market bias.
2. COT Index: On top of commercials net positions
3. Open Interest: Yellow area is for commercials while black is for non-commercials
4. RSI: Relative strength index on top of commercials net positions, because of this things are inverted, the overbought zone is oversold. The reason is explained here.
5. Stochastics: On Top of non-commercials net positions

Both RSI and stochastic signals are triggered when the indicator crosses over the bottom trigger of crosses under the top trigger.

SpreadSheet Mode

The spreadsheet mode will provide you a tabular view of the data with conditional formatting for colors ranging from red to blue, this will help you to spot whether a number is an extreme or it’s not. With red being most positive and blue most negative. At a glance, you can spot what number is extreme.

With just a click in any of the columns and you organize it ascending or descending and if you mess up and want to restore the spreadsheet back, just click the restore button.

All the rows are responsive, so when you click a row the tool will change the date on “Dates:” on Instrument Selector and this will updates charts and signals. So you will see what happened on that particular date.

Non-Commercials Open Interest Map

This is an informative function that you will help you visualize where the money is allocated in the markets. As discussed here, you will see that non-commercials are the weak link of the chain in the markets, as their money is finite and also it’s them that fuel the trends, so it’s a good idea to see where they are allocating their money.

Non-Commercials Net Positions heatMap

The heatmap will help you to see the evolution of speculators(non-commercials) net positions along the weeks. The timeline is from left to right and you can check it up to 24 weeks. I admit that this functionality is a little bit confusing the way is right now, because it considers the range of all instruments, so the heatmap is not clear how it supposed to be, however, it will be updated on the next release.

PAST SIGNALS

In this tab, you can check the signals that were triggered in the past for the Instrument selected in the “Instrument Selector” box. The table is responsive, so when you click it the date on “Dates:” will change and update the whole tool, so you can rapidly check how the data was on that giving date. The following functions will update to that date:

1. Triggered Signals
2. Charts
3. Spreadsheet Mode

The dates displayed in this table are only the ones where some of the 5 available signals where triggered.

BIG MOVERS

This table shows financial instruments that had a 15% change in its non-commercial net position from one week to another, so things that are gaining momentum and should give us opportunities to trade with a direction in mind. You can change the lookback period from 1 to 13 weeks.

In the Side column you will see each side the change in the position happened:

LONG:

1. Cut in 15% of short positions
2. Add in 15% in long positions

Short:

1. Cut in 15% of long positions
2. Add in 15% in short positions

So the tool compares the actual net position with the lookback period selected. If lookback is 1 then it will compare the actual with the last week and so on.

Synthetic Assets

If you are already familiar with COT Data you will realize that there are some assets here dot not contains official data released by CFTC, and that’s true! I wrote an algorithm to combine different assets to create a new one, for example:

AUDCAD:

AUD and CAD official data released by CFTC is mixed to give us AUDCAD.

The same is true for all other synthetic assets inside the tool. Here is the complete list and how they are created:

If you have further questions, suggestions, or criticizes just reply to this post.

My best regards

Leo Hermoso