COT reports: Short positions held by producers and merchants 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 producers and merchants in crude oil futures of the kind "WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE" were 336,870 contracts on 19 May 2026, compared to 386,384 on 12 May.
Sample. There are 1,041 data points in the weekly series displayed in the figure above. The time span covered by the series is from June 2006 to May 2026.
History. Here's a peek at a few descriptive statistics we computed on the entire sample: positions registered a minimum of 207,542 contracts on 28 October 2008; they reached a maximum of 703,430 on 14 February 2017; they had an average value of 404,362.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-05-05 | 378998.0 |
| 2026-05-12 | 386384.0 |
| 2026-05-19 | 336870.0 |
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Series Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Short positions held by producers and merchants 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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