COT reports: Short positions held by swap dealers 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 swap dealers in crude oil futures of the kind "WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE" were 658,184 contracts on 19 May 2026, versus 644,860 on 12 May 2026.
Sample. In this weekly series, there are 1,041 records overall. The series covers the time span stretching from June 2006 to May 2026.
History. Here are a few simple statistics we computed on the whole sample: positions hit a maximum of 852,769 contracts on 30 January 2018; they reached a trough of 62,071 on 17 March 2009; they had an average value of 373,604.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-05-05 | 643671.0 |
| 2026-05-12 | 644860.0 |
| 2026-05-19 | 658184.0 |
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Series Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Short positions held by swap dealers 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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