I’m looking at the commitment of traders report and there’s one thing I don’t understand. For example Asset Mgr is 71,235 contracts long Australian Dollar and 2,955 contracts short Australian dollar, but what pairs are they talking about?
Are they referring to AUD / USD or AUD / Everything? So their total long positions against all AUD pairs is 71,235. So they might be long AUD/EUR but short AUD/JPY for example?
There are no pairs in the COT, currency market futures differs from spot.
You’ll need to check out Cot positions in all the currencies to give you a better idea.
However if the smart money is bullish on the Aud COT that will likely translate to all spot FX pairs
I’m not sure which numbers you’re looking at, but you can find the weekly currency reports here.. These are the currency indexes for each country, they are not currency pairs and you should be looking at “Non Commercial” in the drop down menu.
Here’s a spreadsheet I do each week, I’ve highlighted AUD in blue. At the top you’ll see all the column headings, two of which read “Long: 48,188” and “Short: 80,856”. These are the overall current positions. Beside each of those columns is a “Change” column which tells you the positions added or subtracted for the current week (Feb. 11). This week we can see that there were 10,809 short positions removed, as well as 180 long positions removed, which would lead you to believe that the bias is toward long this week, despite the overall numbers being short.
Now, if you look at the monthly ADX (AU Index) chart, it’s not hard to see why the majority stay short on this currency on a long term basis.
If you are interested in looking at currency pairs, you can find them here. I also have the current week in my chart above.
My issue with these reports is that they are compiled on Tuesday but not released to us until Friday, So beware and use at your own risk.
I’ll looking at these numbers www.cftc . gov/dea/futures/financial_lf . htm (new users can’t post links) and you see Candian Dollar, 48,979 contracts short which is 26,796 less than last week. So when they show the AUD they’re talking about the AUD currency index, so the currency as a whole and not any particular pair.
Also regarding the information being a week late, that doesn’t bother me at all as hedge funds and institutions are not trading on the 5 minute or hourly chart like 99% of retail traders. They may trade news driven things like rate hikes and stuff but they’re primarily trend traders and hold their positions for weeks or months so as long as you know the general direction the smart money is going, a week delayed info is not a big deal.
Make sure to look for setups that favour the direction of these reports because price can go against it for weeks at a time if you just enter randomly. I tested this with a practice account, no SL’s and ended up -$2K in the red on some positions before it started moving my way. And sometimes it never did, sometimes the bias would gradually change direction, admitting they were wrong. So then you’re out a considerable amount of money. The average retail trader is just not equipped psychologically or financially to withstand these types of drawdowns, finally to discover that “smart money” has changed direction on next weeks report. Watch for the subtle clues such as ‘Net Positions’ increasing or decreasing steadily week after week (my chart, right columns).
Over the last few weeks I have been moving away from this report and trusting my own analyses. But I will keep studying it weekly with the hope of a major epiphany some day, but somehow I doubt that, lol.
I don’t just enter or exit a trade based on the COT report alone, I combine it with retail sentiment, 200 day MA, trend lines, RSI etc. I’m aware these guys can stay in positions for months at a time and I’m not trying to copy them in that regard, I just want to know what direction they’re running to so I can tag along and hope to bag a few hundred pips along the way if I can get my entry timed correctly.
And yes I pay close attention to their net positions, if they’re net short but the last couple of weeks they’ve been closing their short positions, chances are they’re looking to go long and visa versa.
Any chance you’d be so kind as to share that spreadsheet? I’ve never been much good at extrapolating data and putting them into spreadsheets.
Thanks.
That is the ultimate goal my friend.
Do you have Excel? If so Barchart gives you 5 free downloads per day and it’s downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet. I manipulate this spreadsheet to my liking then copy/paste the info into Google sheets so that I have access to it wherever I go. If that doesn’t work I will see what I can do to get it over to you.
