Non-Reportable Traders

Non-Reportables (small speculators) is a category of traders specified in the Commitments of Traders Report (CoT report) which represent small investors who hold position in futures that are below the reporting level specified by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Since this catch-all category consists of individual speculators, it does not affect the gold market significantly (it controls a relatively small part of open interest, so it has a relatively weak position in the market).

As one can see in the chart below, non-reportables are typically trend-followers, just like non-commercials. This is why they often form one category with non-commercials, with the label “speculators”. 

Non-preportable Traders and Gold Price

Non-reportables also increase their net long position when gold prices rise and scale it back when prices decrease, and tend to be wrong at critical gold turning points (small investors are often inexperienced and make wrong predictions). This is why many analysts ignore this category; however, analyzing it can sometimes be helpful in gauging retail sentiment (or in contrarian investing).

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

We encourage you to learn more about gold – not only what the CoT report is and who non-reportables are, but how to successfully use multiple gold trading techniques and profit from them. A great way to start is to sign up for our gold newsletter today. It's free and if you don't like it, you can easily unsubscribe.