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 443,743 contracts on 17 February 2026, compared to 429,389 on 10 February 2026.
Sample. There are 1,028 data points overall in the weekly time series presented in the graph above. The series covers the time span going from June 2006 to February 2026.
History. Take a look at some descriptive statistics we computed on the whole sample: positions had a mean of 404,735 contracts; they achieved a maximum of 703,430 on 14 February 2017; they recorded a minimum of 207,542 on 28 October 2008.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-02-03 | 436409.0 |
| 2026-02-10 | 429389.0 |
| 2026-02-17 | 443743.0 |
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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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Discover the other time series included in this data set.