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" were 109,346 contracts on 19 May 2026, versus 114,531 on 12 May.
Sample. There are 1,041 records in the weekly time series displayed in the chart above. The series covers the span of time going from June 2006 to May 2026.
History. Check out some summary statistics we computed on the full sample: positions were equal on average to 73,657 contracts; they recorded a bottom of 14,132 on 17 July 2018; they recorded their highest level of 232,202 on 9 August 2016.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-05-05 | 114964.0 |
| 2026-05-12 | 114531.0 |
| 2026-05-19 | 109346.0 |
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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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