About the commodities positioning monitor

Questions

Is managed money the same as the legacy non-commercial number?

No, and conflating them is the most common error in commodity positioning commentary. The legacy Commitments of Traders report splits the market into commercial and non-commercial; the Disaggregated report splits it four ways — producer/merchant/processor/user, swap dealers, managed money, and other reportables. Managed money is a subset of the old non-commercial bucket, not a rename of it: the residue sits in other reportables, and swap dealers were previously counted as commercial. A managed-money net and a legacy non-commercial net for the same contract on the same date are different numbers, and neither is wrong. Everything on this page is Disaggregated, futures-only, long contracts minus short, and every figure is labelled with the book it came from.

Why is positioning several days behind the price it is plotted against?

Because that is the CFTC release schedule, not a data lag on our side. Every report is a snapshot of open positions at the close of business on a Tuesday, and the file is published the following Friday at 15:30 Eastern. So the freshest positioning available on any given day is three days old at best and ten at worst, and the price on the same row is the close on or before that Tuesday — never a later one. Reading a Friday price against a Tuesday position is the error this join exists to make impossible.

Which Brent contract is this?

The NYMEX Brent Last Day Financial contract, because it is the only Brent in the CFTC Commitments of Traders. ICE Brent futures — the contract most desks mean by "Brent" — are regulated in the UK and are not in the CFTC file at all. The NYMEX lookalike is a cash-settled contract on the same underlying with a far smaller open interest, so its managed-money net is a real position in a real contract but it is not the ICE book, and it should not be read as a proxy for the size of speculative length in Brent overall. The price line beside it is Europe Brent spot.

How is the price joined to the position?

Each report date takes the daily close on or before it, never after. Where a report date falls on a market holiday the previous session is used, and the lag in days is shown in the tooltip; where no close exists on or before a report date the point is a gap rather than an interpolation. The exact rule that served, the source and the unit are printed under the chart, because they are per-contract facts — a metal fixed in London and a grain settled in Chicago do not share a convention.

Why is a z-score sometimes blank?

Because the window has not opened yet. A 156w window needs 156 weekly reports before the first point can be scored, so earlier points show an em-dash rather than a partial window relabelled as a full one. A shorter window is never substituted for a longer one, and a partial window is never rounded up to one.

What is the difference between the history selector and the z-window selector?

The history selector is the x-axis: it decides whether you see six months of reports or twenty years, and it never changes a number. The z-window selector is the arithmetic: it decides how many prior reports form the mean and standard deviation the position is measured against, so it recomputes the z-score everywhere on the chart and in every column of the table. Neither refetches — the whole weekly record arrives with every window pre-computed.

My terminal shows a different z-score for the same contract. Which is right?

Both, of a different measurement. A z-score is a position measured against a window, so the window is part of the number: 52w (1.0y) and 13w (3m) on the same weekly series give two different means, two different standard deviations and two different sigmas. Select the matching window in the z-window row to reproduce a terminal reading. Any small residual after that is the standard-deviation convention, which is printed in full under every chart along with the arithmetic that produced the latest figure, so it can be checked rather than taken on trust.

What do the three books mean?

Managed money is registered commodity trading advisors, commodity pool operators and unregistered funds — the fast, trend-following, position-limited book, and the one whose extremes mark crowding. Producer/merchant/processor/user is the physical trade hedging its own inventory or forward sales, so it is structurally the other side of managed money and its net tells you about the hedge, not about a view. Swap dealers intermediate index and OTC exposure, so their book is largely a mirror of long-only index demand. Other reportables — the residual bucket — is carried in the data but is not offered as a selection, because a z-score on the leftovers measures leftovers.

Positioning from the CFTC Commitments of Traders (Disaggregated), futures-only — free weekly data. Prices from LBMA, EIA, FRED and market data, matched to each CFTC report date. Latest report date 2026-08-04.