Institutional positioning in every major currency
Institutional positioning is how the large traders in currency futures stand: long or short, and by how much. The CFTC publishes their positions every week, and Forex Fundamentals reads them for the major currencies. Positioning sits beside each call as a measure of how crowded the bet is, not as a reason for its direction.
| Currency | Net contracts | Change on the week | Share of open interest |
|---|---|---|---|
 EUR | +84,200 | −6,100 | +21% |
 GBP | +12,300 | +2,400 | +6% |
 CAD | −8,400 | +1,200 | −5% |
 AUD | −27,900 | −3,100 | −14% |
 JPY | −61,500 | +9,800 | −28% |
From the CFTC’s report to the call
The CFTC’s Traders in Financial Futures report splits the market into dealers, asset managers, leveraged funds and other reportable traders. It comes out on Fridays with positions as of the Tuesday before, so positioning is always a few days old.
The figures are free on our COT pages: the net position of leveraged funds in each currency’s futures, its change on the week and its share of open interest. The membership adds what the desk makes of them:
- on each currency’s page, Positioning beside the call: how many traders are already betting the same way;
- on a pair’s page, Positioning as one of the eight parts of the trade score, as points out of its maximum;
- in Pro, the Currency data page, with a year of the CFTC’s counts for each currency on a chart.
Why crowding counts
A crowded bet does not stop being right, but it gets more expensive to be wrong in. The sharpest reversals come out of positions everyone already holds.
So the desk reads positioning as a risk to the size of a trade, not as evidence for its direction. A Bullish call with crowded longs behind it is still Bullish; the crowd is a reason to size it with care.
How the desk works
Every Bias, Score and Call comes from the same routine.
It reads the sources: central banks, statistics offices and the CFTC’s positioning report.
It scores each of the ten currencies Factor by Factor; the Score adds them up.
It gives each currency a Bias with a Confidence, and each pair it trades a Call: Buy, Sell or Range.
It writes down why, and what would change the call.
It reads a call again when the data behind it changes: a release, a central-bank decision, a shift in positioning.
It is research, not a signal service: entry, size and exit stay yours.
Questions
Isn’t COT data too late to trade on?
For timing an entry, yes: it is a few days old when it comes out. It is for the bigger picture: whether a move has a crowd behind it, and how much room that crowd leaves.
Which currencies does the report cover?
Our COT pages cover eight: the euro, the pound, the yen, the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand dollars, the Swiss franc, and the US dollar through the Dollar Index contract.
Forex Fundamentals is research, not investment advice: entry, size and exit stay yours. Trading foreign exchange carries risk.