Crude Oil Speculators Decrease Overall Bearish Bets
Zachary Storella | Aug 10, 2014 01:34AM ET
Crude Oil: Futures market traders and large commodity speculators decreased their overall bullish bets in crude oil futures last week for a sixth consecutive week and to the lowest standing since January, according to the latest Commitment of Traders (COT) data released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Friday.
The non-commercial contracts of crude oil futures, traded by large speculators, traders and hedge funds, fell to a total net position of +347,204 contracts in the data reported for August 5th. This was a change of -17,535 contracts from the previous week’s total of +364,739 net contracts for the data reported through July 29th.
For the week, overall long positions dropped by a total of -19,571 contracts and over-matched the short positions that had a small decline of just 2,036 contracts to show the overall weekly net change of -17,535 contracts. The non-commercial trader’s net positions fell to the lowest bullish level since January 21st when net positions equaled +340,049 contracts.
Over the same weekly reporting time-frame, from Tuesday July 29th to Tuesday August 5th, the crude oil price dropped from $100.97 to $97.38 per barrel, according to Nymex futures price data from investing.com. Brent crude prices, meanwhile, also saw a decline from $107.72 to $104.61 per barrel from Tuesday July 29th to Tuesday August 5th, according to price data from investing.com.
Disclaimer: The weekly commitment of traders report summarizes the total trader positions for open contracts in the futures trading markets. The CFTC categorizes trader positions according to commercial hedgers (traders who use futures contracts for hedging as part of the business), non-commercials (large traders who speculate to realize trading profits) and nonreportable traders (usually small traders/speculators).
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