Between 2001 and 2004, volume in the foreign-exchange market increased more than 50%, illustrating the overall rise in popularity of currency trading. The advent of online trading following the technology boom has allowed many equity and futures traders to look beyond their more traditional trading instruments. Most short-term traders or speculators trade FX based on technical...

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/05/COTreport.asp

As a student of commodity market analysis some 35 years ago, I recall my teacher, the late Victor Lea of the New York Institute of Finance, saying that commodity price forecasting would be simple if we only knew who was buying and selling futures contracts, and why. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tried to partially address this problem by...

http://www.crbtrader.com/pubs/yb/yb1985_cot.asp

Over the years, in a continuous effort to better inform the public about futures markets, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has improved the COT...

http://www.cftc.gov/opa/backgrounder/opacot596.htm

I have discussed in past articles how volume and open interest can be used to help identify and confirm market situations and trading opportunities. I'll take open interest one step farther in this column by examining the Commitments of Traders (C.O.T.) report, issued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The C.O.T. report is...

http://www.jimwyckoff.com/articles/edu/commitments.html

With gold, silver, and gold stocks all in typical technical bottoming patterns, sentiment among precious-metals investors is understandably rotten. When prices feel low people feel bad. It is always this way near major interim bottoms. While I receive countless e-mails laden with despair during times like these, one this week did a fantastic job of summing up how so many investors are feeling today. This gentleman, talking about gold stocks in particular, wrote to me… "I am so tired of losing money on these stocks, it seems like we've been in a bear market for the last 2 years with occasional rallies that seem to get weaker. How can guys like you figure...

http://www.zealllc.com/2005/goldcot.htm

...graphs above show the CFTC CoT open interest data for the July 17 CoT report. The left two pie graphs represent long and short open interest percentages in NASDAQ 100 futures and options, and the right two graphs outline the S&P 500 futures and options positions. The top two graphs represent commercial bearish (red) and bullish (green) positions, and the bottom two graphs represent non-commercial open interest sentiment. The graphs show an incredible divergence between commercial hedgers and non-commercial speculators in their predictions of ...

http://www.zealllc.com/2000/descent.htm