Release: 5760-09
For Release: December 4, 2009

CFTC Announces Additional Markets to be Disaggregated in Commitments of Traders Reports

Washington, DC – The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that effective today, Friday, December 4, 2009, the CFTC will include disaggregated data on all U.S. physical commodity markets in its weekly Commitments of Traders (COT) reports. The CFTC began publishing disaggregated data for 22 major physical commodity markets on September 4, 2009, and is now disaggregating data on the remaining physical commodity markets where there are 20 or more reportable traders.

The CFTC is disaggregating COT data as part of an ongoing effort to improve market transparency by providing more detailed data regarding traders. While previous COT reports had broken traders into commercial and noncommercial categories, the CFTC now disaggregates the data into four categories of traders:

• Producer/Merchant/Processor/User;
• Swap Dealers;
• Managed Money; and
• Other Reportables.

The CFTC’s market transparency initiative is described more fully in a CFTC press release 5710-09 entitled, “CFTC Implements New Transparency Efforts to Promote Market Integrity.”

As it did with respect to the initial 22 markets, the CFTC will shortly make available three years of historical data for the remaining markets.

The CFTC also is working to create a new COT report for all of the financial markets in a form that will improve transparency for those markets. The categories of this new financial COT may be different from those being applied to the physical markets described above. The CFTC is working on improvements to the agency’s Form 40, Statement of Reporting Trader, to improve the accuracy of trader classifications.

See the links at right to “Related Links” for further details.

Media Contacts
Scott Schneider
202-418-5080

R. David Gary
202-418-5080

Last Updated: December 4, 2009