Stats › Options, shorts and positioning › Commitment of Traders
Commitment of Traders positioning
Once a week the US futures regulator publishes a breakdown of who is holding S&P 500 futures. Not individual names, categories. Pension funds, endowments and insurers in one bucket. Hedge funds and similar money managers in another. The banks that make markets in a third. It's one of the very few places where you get to look at real positioning instead of somebody's opinion about positioning.
This page is the most recent report, for 28 July 2026, with the categories explained in plain language and an honest look at what the headline configuration means. Asset managers enormously net long, dealers heavily net short, hedge funds short as well. Written up as a headline that sounds like a standoff between smart money and dumb money. Most of it is plumbing.
I built the page because Commitment of Traders numbers get quoted constantly as a sentiment gauge, and once you understand how the report is put together that reading becomes very hard to defend. The useful thing here is descriptive: it tells you how the market is structured and who is carrying the risk, which is worth knowing even on the days it predicts nothing. Every position figure comes straight from the CFTC's own weekly file for that report date, linked below. It's a public file. Open it and count the columns yourself if you want to check me.
In the CFTC's Traders in Financial Futures report for 28 July 2026, E-mini S&P 500 open interest was 1,984,408 contracts. Asset managers were net long 944,770 contracts, leveraged funds net short 297,476 and dealers net short 757,194. That configuration, long real money and short dealers and hedge funds, is the standard structural arrangement rather than a market call, and misreading it as a sentiment signal is the most common error with this dataset.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 2 named sources, roughly 1300 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.