Commitments of Traders

I've been looking at this, but i've never traded from it. If anyone has some experience, i'd appreciate hearing from you.

I'm looking at the column that indicates the changes in commitments from the previous week. I'm just curious to see how currency pairs match up with the futures and options positioning.

You can look at the commitments of commercial and non-commercial traders and also the net change for both trader classifications

I'm going to concentrate on the "non-commercials" becasue these are the "speculative" traders as opposed to the "commercial" traders who are classified as commercial because they are using contracts a "hedge". I'll ignore the "totals" for now.

For the CAD there was a large amount of shorts that came out of the market
(-1,653) and an even larger amount of longs that came in (17,279)

For the CHF there was an almost equal number of shorts and longs coming in.

For the GBP there was a large number of longs coming out of the market (-9,395) while 1,798 shorts came in.

For the Yen -4,670 longs came out of the market while 11,136 shorts came in.

If you use the COT at all, i'd appreciate your input.

I just started looking at them and intend to run a study plotting weekly COT vs. weekly (and/or daily) currencies.

I already started with GBPUSD but from Jan 2007on. There was a slighlty indication of a positive correlation between them, but it feels like I need to run a larger term study, possibly years, to verify it better...

There is a long and interesting thread here on FF that focuses on using the COT as a leading indicator for medium to long term trading.

Look for something like COT WEEKLY TRADING STRATEGY

The author also wrote his own (free) ebook about the methods he uses which can be downloaded right from FF.

Lou

I used COT for some while.

There is an article for the argument.

Thanks for the input-what it does seem to be saying is that the $ looks to improve vs the GBP and decrease vs the Yen. If that were to happen it would indicate carry trades would unwind to a degree.

We'll see what happens.

The cots work best when extremes are made. Trying to use it everyday or week is kind of futile. I got tons of back data and tested the heck out of it. Open Interest is definitely the key.