Disaggregated COT reports

Since October, 2009, two new types of COT reports are published, one of them is the Disaggregated report. The new report practically breaks down the Legacy report's Commercial category into smaller, more uniform pieces. Here are the categories explained:

1 Producer/Merchant/Processor/User:

companies that produce, process, pack or handle the physical commodity and use the futures markets to hedge price risks.

2 Swap dealer:

uses the futures markets to hedge price risks related to swaps. These traders may well be connected to speculative traders - this is the reason why the new category was needed. In most cases it is unknown that the counterparty is really a hedge fund or a commercial producer/processor.

3 Money manager:

a registered Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA), a Commodity Pool Operator (CPO) or an unregistered fund identified by the CFTC.

4 Other reportables:

large traders, effectively speculators, who cannot be classified in the above categories.

Check out the full explanation of Disaggregated data by CFTC.