COMEX Other Reportables

Other reportables is a category of Comex traders specified in the disaggregated version of the Commitments of Traders Report (CoT report) published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which represents traders that do not fit into any other category. Usually these are larger traders that trade for their own accounts. In the disaggregated version of the CoT report, other reportables and money managers replace non-commercials from the aggregated version.

From an investment perspective, other reportable positions indicate market trends, at times, but in a less clearly visible way than in the case of money managers. As one can see in the chart below, other reportables are usually net long and usually follow trends in the gold market – they increase their net long position when prices rise and scale it back when prices decrease. Consequently, close to the end of the rally, they tend to have their most bullish positions. In other words, other reportables are generally on the right side of the market, but they tend to become overextended near peaks and bottoms. For example, other reportables were adding more net long trades between 2011 and 2013 when they reached their most bullish positions. This is why investors look at other reportables and use changes in their positions as a sentiment indicator for the gold market – other reportables tend to be most bullish just prior to significant price tops and most bearish before significant price bottoms.

Chart 1: The price of gold (yellow line, right axis, London P.M. fix) and the net position of other reportables (blue line, left axis) from 1986 to March 8, 2016.

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