COT reports: Short positions held by all reporting traders 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 all reporting traders in crude oil futures of the kind "WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE" were 1,985,602 contracts on 27 January 2026, compared to 1,915,570 on 20 January.
Sample. There are 1,025 data points in the weekly series displayed in the chart above. The time period covered by the series is from June 2006 to January 2026.
History. Here’s a quick look at a few descriptive statistics computed on the full sample: positions had a mean of 1,661,602 contracts; they hit a minimum of 903,260 on 20 June 2006; they hit a maximum of 2,618,389 on 15 May 2018.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-01-13 | 1960986.0 |
| 2026-01-20 | 1915570.0 |
| 2026-01-27 | 1985602.0 |
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Series Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Short positions held by all reporting traders 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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