Learn COT Report Analysis as a daily desk routine.
A COT Report Analysis course that teaches weekly participant positioning as context: confirm report date, commodity, market, and lookback first, then decode buckets, position changes, historical stretch, alerts, and caveated desk notes.
Course snapshot
Question
Whose positioning am I trying to understand, and how fresh is the report?
Tool cue
Open COT Report Analysis
Guardrail
COT is a weekly positioning backdrop, not a trade trigger.
Source pack
6 references
Lesson path
Follow the same order as the desk.
- 1COT Report Analysis: Start With The Weekly Positioning QuestionA beginner-safe COT lesson for turning the first dashboard view into a weekly positioning question before any signal rail, percentile, or alert label gets interpreted.12 min5 sources
- 2COT Report Analysis: Decode Trader Groups Before Reading BiasA beginner-safe COT lesson for translating participant buckets into practical desk questions while keeping CFTC classification limits visible.13 min5 sources
- 3COT Report Analysis: Read Net Position And Weekly Change Without PanicA beginner-safe COT lesson for turning long, short, net, weekly change, gross exposure, and open interest into one practical ledger read.14 min5 sources
- 4COT Report Analysis: Use Percentiles And COT Index As Context, Not TimingA beginner-safe COT lesson for using percentiles and COT Index as historical context while keeping lookback, category, and no-timing caveats visible.14 min5 sources
- 5COT Report Analysis: Read Charts For Sponsorship, Cooling, And CrowdingA beginner-safe COT lesson for using chart patterns and open-interest flow to describe participant behavior without forecasting from the chart.14 min5 sources
- 6COT Report Analysis: Build The Weekly COT Desk ReadA synthesis lesson for writing one practical COT desk note from the Analysis, Sentiment, Charts, report calendar, and historical case-study surfaces.15 min6 sources
- 7COT Report Analysis: Spot Crowding, Concentration, And Squeeze VulnerabilityAn Advanced-tab COT lesson for using crowding, concentration, squeeze risk, and current price behavior as a disciplined review lens.14 min5 sources
- 8COT Report Analysis: Use Advanced Regime Lenses With HumilityAn Advanced-tab COT lesson for choosing the right advanced lens, checking history depth, and downgrading heuristic labels before writing a desk note.15 min5 sources
- 9COT Report Analysis: Turn Alerts Into A Review QueueAn Alerts-tab COT lesson for filtering alerts, assigning review depth, routing one adjacent check, and deciding whether to review, downgrade, or ignore an alert.14 min5 sources
- 10COT Report Analysis: Write The COT Desk Note And HandoffA COT capstone lesson for writing the final weekly read, naming caveats and invalidation, and routing the hypothesis to Calendar, Fair Value, Pivot, Seasonal, Correlation, or Backtest.15 min6 sources