COT reports: Short positions held by money managers 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 money managers in crude oil futures of the kind "WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE" were 117,333 contracts on 27 January 2026, compared to 122,155 on 20 January.
Sample. There are 1,025 data points overall in the weekly series presented in the figure above. The time period covered by the series stretches from June 2006 to January 2026.
History. Take a look at a few summary statistics calculated on the entire sample: positions hit a trough of 14,132 contracts on 17 July 2018; they attained a maximum of 232,202 on 9 August 2016; they had an average value of 73,115.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-01-13 | 126639.0 |
| 2026-01-20 | 122155.0 |
| 2026-01-27 | 117333.0 |
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Series Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Short positions held by money managers 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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