Hedge funds cut oil bets: reading the Commitment of Traders report with Brent and WTI data

Two posts by Giovanni Staunovo on X on Nov 6, 2026 prompted this explainer. The first reads: “Crude: Positioning of money managers in Brent and WTI futures and options #OOTT latest value is November 3”, with a chart of long, short and net positions since 2011. The second reads: “Sharp drop in open interest in Brent”, with a chart he labels “Aggregated open interest in Brent and WTI in million contracts”. We did not copy numbers from either chart. Every figure below is our own arithmetic on the exchange and regulator files, read on Nov 13, 2026, so it may differ from his charts where his method differs.

What the Commitment of Traders report is

The Commitments of Traders (COT) report is a weekly count of who holds futures and options positions. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) says its reports “provide a breakdown of each Tuesday's open interest for markets in which 20 or more traders hold positions equal to or above the reporting levels established by the CFTC.” Searches for “commitment of traders report”, “COT report” and “CFTC COT report” all lead to the same family of reports.

For crude oil there are two publishers:

• CFTC, for NYMEX WTI. The benchmark WTI contract is listed as “WTI-PHYSICAL - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE”, contract market code 067651, in the CFTC Public Reporting Environment.
• ICE Futures Europe, for ICE Brent. The main Brent contract trades in London, and the exchange publishes its own weekly file, COTHist2026.csv, with the same column names as the CFTC's Disaggregated report. ICE Brent positions are not in the CFTC datasets we used.

Both contracts are for 1,000 barrels, so one contract of net length is 1,000 barrels of exposure.

Which rows and columns we used

The Disaggregated report splits reportable traders into four groups. “Hedge funds” in headlines is shorthand for one of them, Managed Money. The CFTC defines it this way: “A ‘money manager,’ for the purpose of this report, is a registered commodity trading advisor (CTA); a registered commodity pool operator (CPO); or an unregistered fund identified by CFTC.” So the group is wider than hedge funds alone.

• Brent: ICE file rows named “ICE Brent Crude Futures and Options - ICE Futures Europe”, columns M_Money_Positions_Long_All, M_Money_Positions_Short_All and Open_Interest_All.
• WTI: CFTC dataset kh3c-gbw2 (Disaggregated, futures and options combined), code 067651, fields m_money_positions_long_all, m_money_positions_short_all and open_interest_all.
• Net is long minus short. We leave out the spreading column, which the CFTC describes as “a computed amount equal to offsetting long and short positions held by a trader.”
• Futures-only open interest comes from the ICE rows named “ICE Brent Crude Futures - ICE Futures Europe” and CFTC dataset 72hh-3qpy.

Worked example for Brent on Nov 3, 2026: 302,146 long − 120,176 short = 181,970 net long. For WTI: 160,403 − 75,100 = 85,303. Added together: 267,273 contracts.

The week to Nov 3, 2026

Reading the table:

• Most of the fall was longs being closed. Gross longs fell by 60,615 of the 77,955 contracts, about 78% (60,615 ÷ 77,955). Gross shorts rose by 17,340, the other 22%.
• Brent moved more than WTI. Brent net length went from 245,457 to 181,970 (−25.9%). WTI went from 99,771 to 85,303 (−14.5%).
• It was a large week, not the largest. It was the third-biggest weekly fall in combined net length in 2026, after the weeks to Jun 16, 2026 (−100,085) and May 26, 2026 (−79,580).

Brent and WTI positioning through 2026

Combined net length started the year at 145,545 contracts on Jan 6, 2026. It reached its 2026 high of 576,565 contracts on Mar 17, 2026 and its low of 129,766 on Jul 7, 2026. The Nov 3, 2026 reading is 53.6% below the March high. The two contracts peaked on different dates: Brent net length was highest on Mar 31, 2026 (429,853) and WTI on Mar 24, 2026 (148,985). Combined gross longs, at 462,549 on Nov 3, 2026, were the lowest of any week in 2026.

The price columns are context, not a rule. Brent's daily average was $114.40 on Oct 27, 2026 with combined net length at 345,228 contracts. It was $102.87 on Mar 17, 2026 with net length at 576,565. A higher price went with a smaller net long position, so the level of positioning on its own does not tell you the level of the price. See the live Brent crude price and WTI crude price for current values.

Open interest, and what a fall means

The CFTC defines it: “Open interest is the total of all futures and/or option contracts entered into and not yet offset by a transaction, by delivery, by exercise, etc.” Every open contract has one long and one short, so open interest says how many contracts exist, not which way anyone leans. When it falls, more contracts were closed than opened.

ICE Brent futures-only open interest was 2,433,965 contracts on Nov 3, 2026, down 162,313 (−6.3%) from 2,596,278 on Oct 27, 2026. That is the lowest weekly reading of 2026; the highest was 3,383,349 on Jan 27, 2026. With options included, Brent open interest was 3,272,138, also the lowest of 2026. NYMEX WTI did not follow: futures-only open interest rose from 1,886,280 to 1,908,732 in the same week.

Read together, the week to Nov 3, 2026 in Brent shows net length down and open interest down. That pattern fits positions being closed more than new opposing positions being opened, which matches the long-side fall in the table above. This is our reading of the counts, not a statement from ICE or the CFTC.

Why funds cut length: what the report can and cannot say

The report counts positions on a Tuesday. It does not record why a trader changed them, and it does not show what happened between Tuesdays. What the same week's data does show:

• Brent's daily average fell from $114.40 on Oct 27, 2026 to $104.78 on Nov 3, 2026, a fall of 8.4% (104.78 ÷ 114.40 − 1). WTI fell from $100.81 to $96.84, or 3.9% (OilPriceAPI daily averages).
• Net length fell more in the contract whose price fell more: Brent by 25.9%, WTI by 14.5%.

Both moved in the same week. The data cannot say which came first, and we do not assign a cause. Anyone who gives a reason is adding information from outside the report.

Five traps when reading COT data

1. Futures-only versus combined. The combined report converts options to futures equivalents. The CFTC says option positions “are computed on a futures-equivalent basis using delta factors supplied by the exchanges.” The two versions give different totals: Brent open interest on Nov 3, 2026 was 2,433,965 futures only and 3,272,138 combined. Say which one a number is.
2. Legacy versus Disaggregated. The older Legacy report has a “non-commercial” group that is not the same as Managed Money. In NYMEX WTI, Legacy non-commercial net length, futures only, rose from 74,343 to 80,289 in the week to Nov 3, 2026 (CFTC dataset 6dca-aqww), while Managed Money net length, combined, fell from 99,771 to 85,303. Same market, same week, opposite direction.
3. Report date versus release date. The data is for a Tuesday. The CFTC says the weekly reports “are released every Friday at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time”, and its schedule adds that federal holidays may delay a release. The Nov 3, 2026 report came out on Nov 6, 2026. The CFTC release schedule lists the next one, for Nov 10, 2026, on Nov 16, 2026, delayed by a federal holiday. When we read ICE's file on Nov 13, 2026, its latest Brent row was also Nov 3, 2026.
4. NYMEX Brent is not ICE Brent. The CFTC does publish a row called “BRENT LAST DAY - NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE” (code 06765T). Its futures-only open interest on Nov 3, 2026 was 207,607 contracts, against 2,433,965 for ICE Brent. A “Brent” series built from CFTC data alone describes the small contract, not the benchmark.
5. Net hides gross. The same net number can come from large longs and large shorts or from small ones. Check the long and short columns before reading a change in net as buying or selling.

What OilPriceAPI serves, and what it does not

The Brent and WTI prices in this post come from our API. The positioning figures did not come from our API: we read them from the ICE and CFTC files. As of Nov 13, 2026 our /v1/indicators/cftc-positioning endpoint serves the CFTC Legacy report's non-commercial group for NYMEX WTI, futures only (dataset 6dca-aqww, code 067651). It does not serve the managed-money category, the combined report or ICE Brent positions, and its Brent entry is the NYMEX Brent Last Day contract from trap 4. Adding those is tracked in our API backlog. The endpoint is listed on the calculated metrics documentation page.

Related reading: the Brent crude futures curve and our post on the Brent gasoil crack spread in October 2026.

Sources

• ICE Futures Europe, COTHist2026.csv (linked from the ICE Report Center): ICE Brent Crude rows, futures only and futures and options combined, report dates Jan 6 to Nov 3, 2026. Retrieved Nov 13, 2026.
• CFTC Public Reporting Environment, code 067651: Disaggregated, futures and options combined (kh3c-gbw2); Disaggregated, futures only (72hh-3qpy); Legacy, futures only (6dca-aqww), which also holds code 06765T. Retrieved Nov 13, 2026.
• CFTC: About the COT Reports; Explanatory Notes; Disaggregated Explanatory Notes; Release Schedule.
• Giovanni Staunovo on X, Nov 6, 2026: money-manager positioning in Brent and WTI and open interest in Brent.
• OilPriceAPI, /v1/prices/past_year?interval=1d, codes BRENT_CRUDE_USD and WTI_USD, daily averages. Retrieved Nov 13, 2026.

This is an explainer of a public report. It makes no forecast. Nothing here is investment advice.