COT reports: Short positions held by money managers 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 money managers in crude oil futures of the kind "WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE" stood at 104,433 contracts on 31 March 2026, compared to 86,803 on 24 March 2026.
Sample. In this weekly series, there are 1,034 data points overall. The series covers the time span going from June 2006 to March 2026.
History. Here's a snapshot of some simple statistics we calculated on the full sample: positions reached their highest level of 232,202 contracts on 9 August 2016; they hit a trough of 14,132 on 17 July 2018; they were equal on average to 73,419.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-03-17 | 92982.0 |
| 2026-03-24 | 86803.0 |
| 2026-03-31 | 104433.0 |
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Series Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Short positions held by money managers 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 |
Series in the same data set
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