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" stood at 386,821 contracts on 27 January 2026, compared to 366,556 on 20 January.
Sample. There are 1,025 records overall in the weekly series displayed in the chart above. The period covered by the series is from June 2006 to January 2026.
History. Here’s a quick look at a few summary statistics we calculated on the full sample: positions had an average value of 404,642 contracts; they hit a maximum of 703,430 on 14 February 2017; they hit a trough of 207,542 on 28 October 2008.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Number of contracts |
|---|---|
| 2026-01-13 | 376056.0 |
| 2026-01-20 | 366556.0 |
| 2026-01-27 | 386821.0 |
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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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