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COT Report: Metals, energy demand offset by broad Ag selling
Commodities
Ole Hansen
Head of Commodity Strategy
This content is marketing material.
Key points:
- Our weekly commitment of traders update highlights futures positions and changes made by hedge funds across forex and commodities during the week ending Tuesday, 3 June 2025.
- In forex, speculators reduced their overall USD short position versus eight IMM futures despite fresh greenback weakness.
- In-demand energy and metals being partly offset by broad selling across the agriculture sector.
- Silver length rose to near a five-year high ahead of the USD 35 breakout, while platinum short selling was seen ahead of surge.
Forex:
In the latest reporting week to 3 June, the period saw the USD trade broadly weaker. Speculators nevertheless responded by reducing their overall short USD position versus the eight IMM FX futures contracts by 8%, to USD 12.2 billion. At the individual currency level, buying of EUR and MXN was more than offset by selling of JPY and CAD.
Strong metals and energy demand offset by agriculture selling
The reporting week to 3 June showed a major divergence in hedge funds’ appetite for exposure—strong demand for energy and metals, both precious and industrial, was partly offset by broad net selling across the agriculture sector. Overall, the Bloomberg Commodity Index rose 0.4% during the week, with strong gains across both metals sectors being offset by a 3.4% loss in the agriculture sector, where all components except coffee suffered setbacks.
At the individual commodity level, hedge funds concentrated their demand in WTI crude oil, gas oil, natural gas, gold, and silver. Meanwhile, the broad selling in agriculture was led by soybeans, corn, and sugar.
Silver—which had yet to break the USD 35 resistance level as of last Tuesday—saw its net long rise by 36% to 45.4k contracts, just 4.3k contracts below the five-year high set in March. In contrast, fresh short selling reduced the platinum net long by 31% to 12.8k contracts, just before prices embarked on a fresh surge that resulted in a 12% rise since last Tuesday.
What is the Commitments of Traders report?
The COT reports are issued by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the ICE Exchange Europe for Brent crude oil and gas oil. They are released every Friday after the U.S. close with data from the week ending the previous Tuesday. They break down the open interest in futures markets into different groups of users depending on the asset class.
Commodities: Producer/Merchant/Processor/User, Swap dealers, Managed Money and other
Financials: Dealer/Intermediary; Asset Manager/Institutional; Leveraged Funds and other
Forex: A broad breakdown between commercial and non-commercial (speculators)
The main reasons why we focus primarily on the behavior of speculators, such as hedge funds and trend-following CTA's are:
- They are likely to have tight stops and no underlying exposure that is being hedged
- This makes them most reactive to changes in fundamental or technical price developments
- It provides views about major trends but also helps to decipher when a reversal is looming
Do note that this group tends to anticipate, accelerate, and amplify price changes that have been set in motion by fundamentals. Being followers of momentum, this strategy often sees this group of traders buy into strength and sell into weakness, meaning that they are often found holding the biggest long near the peak of a cycle or the biggest short position ahead of a through in the market.
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