COT reports: Short positions held by all reporting traders in crude oil futures: WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE (number of contracts) - United States - CFTC - Weekly
This series is part of the dataset: Crude oil futures COT reports (CFTC)
Download Full Dataset (.xlsx)Latest updates. According to the Commitments of Traders (COT) reports published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), short positions held by all reporting traders in crude oil futures of the kind "WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE" were 1,844,849 contracts on 18 August 2026, versus 1,847,521 on 11 August.
Sample. There are 1,054 data points overall in the weekly series displayed in the graph above. The series covers the span of time stretching from June 2006 to August 2026.
History. Here's a glimpse of a few descriptive statistics we calculated on the full sample: positions recorded a minimum of 903,260 contracts on 20 June 2006; they recorded their maximum of 2,618,389 on 15 May 2018; they had an average value of 1,669,552.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-04 | 1847837.0 |
| 2026-08-11 | 1847521.0 |
| 2026-08-18 | 1844849.0 |
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Series Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Short positions held by all reporting traders in crude oil futures |
| Country | United States |
| Economic concept | Stock |
| Data type | Quantity |
| Seasonally adjusted | No |
| Deflation method | Not applicable |
| Rescaling | None |
| Measure type | Level |
| Frequency | Weekly |
| Unit | Number of contracts |
| Source | Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) |
| Source type | Government agency |
| Data licence | Public domain information |
| Other information | Specific future: WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE |
| FSR temporal aggregation code | LW1 |
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