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 338,431 contracts on 18 August 2026, compared to 319,297 on 11 August 2026.
Sample. The weekly time series displayed in the plot has 1,054 observations in total. The span of time covered by the series is from June 2006 to August 2026.
History. Here's a peek at a few statistics we calculated on the full sample: positions averaged 403,211 contracts; they reached their minimum of 207,542 on 28 October 2008; they hit a peak of 703,430 on 14 February 2017.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-04 | 307859.0 |
| 2026-08-11 | 319297.0 |
| 2026-08-18 | 338431.0 |
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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 |
Series in the same data set
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