Read an asset
A repeatable method — same logic for every asset.
The Dollar Index is showing an Intensity Divergence signal, as Asset Managers are reducing their long exposure despite the ongoing trend. This is a warning sign that momentum is fading. With a COT Index of 78%, Asset Managers are still positioned on the long side but have started to unwind their positions.
Dollar Index — illustrative data. Numbers reflect a real weekly snapshot.
Find the primary actor for this asset's market:
- Asset Managers — Forex, Indices, Bonds, Crypto
- Commercials (PMPU on Gold/Silver/grains · Swap Dealers on Oil) — Commodities · NatGas / Copper = Swap Dealers, net long → read as ◈ Extreme, non-directional
That's the line the dashboard highlights with the PRIMARY badge.
Then look at three things in order:
- Long, Short, Net — what's their absolute position today?
- Change vs last week — are they building (|net| ↑) or reducing (|net| ↓)?
- COT Index — where does this week's net sit in the 52-week range? Stretched (>85% / <15%) or in the middle?
Combine the three to read what's actually happening:
- Profit taking — net positive, reducing, COT Index high. Bulls are stepping out, conviction draining.
- Building conviction — net building in the same direction, COT Index rising but not yet stretched. Trend is real.
- Exhaustion — COT Index stretched and primary actor reducing. First week of reduction at an extreme = the actual warning.
- Speculative trap — only the secondary actor (Leveraged Funds) is moving. Watch out: speculative-only rallies don't hold.
Open Interest = total contracts outstanding. It tells you whether the move is backed by fresh capital or just position reshuffling.
Cross OI with step 1:
- OI ↑ + net building — real conviction. Fresh money entering on the same side. Healthy trend.
- OI ↓ + net building — paper move. The opposite side is closing, not new buyers/sellers stepping in. Fragile.
- OI ↑ + net reducing — resistance. New participants entering against the existing positioning.
- OI ↓ + net reducing — exhaustion / profit taking. Everyone's stepping out.
The OI label on each asset card tells you instantly — no manual calculation needed.
The 8-combination matrix (4 net signs × 4 OI directions) is in section 4. The dashboard surfaces the matching cell directly on the detail page.
Look at the badges on the card and the detail page. If one is showing, prioritize the reading on it — it tells you something specific is happening this week, not just generic positioning.
- ↕ Flip — primary actor net changed sign. Regime shift on the asset.
- ◈ Positioning Extreme — COT Index > 85% or < 15%. Vigilance signal, not a reversal signal on its own.
- ∆ Move — primary actor repositioned significantly this week without a regime flip. A notable acceleration, not a trend change.
- Pole-specific signals — Commercial Extremes (Commodities), Momentum Signals (Forex), Institutional Divergence / Persistent Divergence (Indices), Institutional Entry (Crypto). See section 3.
Signals appear directly on the asset card and in the Weekly Top Movers.
No badge active? That's also information — it means positioning this week is unremarkable.
Each asset detail page has a contextual analysis paragraph generated from the week's data — 4 to 6 sentences interpreting the active signals, the positioning, and the cross-actor dynamic.
Use it as a second pair of eyes on the same data: it stitches the elements together (signal + OI + COT Index + actor split) into a single read. Stay critical:
- It interprets the data on the page — it doesn't have outside knowledge of news, macro context or chart price action.
- It's a positioning read, not a trade recommendation.
- If your own reading from steps 1–3 disagrees, your own reading wins. COTflow Insight is here to assist, not to outsource.
The Dollar Index is showing an Intensity Divergence signal, as Asset Managers are reducing their long exposure despite the ongoing trend. A COT Index of 78% confirms the market is stretched — this is a momentum fade, not yet a reversal. Watch for a second consecutive week of reduction before acting.
⚠️ If your own reading from steps 1–3 disagrees, your own reading wins. COTflow Insight is here to assist, not to outsource.
COTflow Insight is generated on demand — requires a free API key in Settings.
Last step — a glance at the 12-week chart on the detail page. Two net curves (primary + secondary actor) plotted against the zero line, with Open Interest shown as a sub-chart below.
Net positions over 12 weeks — AM flipping from short to long while LF exits. The flip week is the highest-priority signal.
You're looking for shape, not numbers:
- Are the two curves aligned across the last weeks, or are they diverging?
- Is the move new or a continuation of a multi-week trend?
- Is OI rising with positioning, or flat/falling?
The chart confirms or invalidates the read you built from steps 1–4. If the chart picture contradicts the numbers, look again.
Weekly routine
Friday, the report is out. Here's exactly what to do.
Open the dashboard. Read the Weekly Top Movers panel at the top — flips first, then extremes, then large amplitude moves. You'll know in under two minutes which assets actually moved this week.
Your starting point every Friday — sorted by signal priority and positioning amplitude.
For each asset on your watchlist, run through the section 1 method — primary actors, Open Interest, active signals, COTflow Insight, net position chart. 1–2 minutes per asset, depending on how active the week was.
- For each asset, check primary actors first — is conviction building or reducing?
- Cross with Open Interest — does the capital flow confirm the move?
- Check for active signals — a badge changes the priority of the read.
- Run COTflow Insight if the setup is ambiguous — one click in the detail view.
- Glance at the net position chart — is this week consistent with the trend?
- Your shortlist surfaces instantly every Friday
- Signals and data update automatically with the weekly report
Your pinned assets — updated automatically every Friday.
Write down 2–3 things that stood out: a flip on DXY, a new alignment on Gold, an extreme building on Wheat. Keeping a short weekly log makes patterns visible across months — and prevents you from re-reading the same setup twice.
Pick 2–3 correlated assets (DXY + EUR, BTC + ETH + SOL, Gold + Silver + Copper) and generate a cross-asset analysis. The point is to surface convergence or divergence between related markets — same direction = confirmation, opposite = warning.
Asset Profile
Before you read this week, understand how the asset has behaved historically.
The weekly read tells you what changed this week. The Asset Profile gives you the backdrop: every structural signal an asset has ever produced over the last seven years, in one place. Open it from the main menu, or from any asset's detail view.
- Seven years of signals for any asset — flips, extremes, divergences, entries, the lot.
- Filter by signal type — pick an asset and a signal (e.g. ◈ Extremes), and only the buckets that actually fired for it are shown.
- Historical stats — how often a signal fires, its average duration, the record streak, and the share of time the asset spends in an extreme zone.
- Price + COT Index chart over seven years, with the events marked directly on the timeline.
- Full episodic timeline — persistent states are compressed into episodes; every event is clickable.
- Click any event → opens the episode panel for that period — positioning, signals, and regime context as they stood at the time.
Use it to calibrate conviction: a ◈ Positioning Extreme that fires twice a year on an asset means more than one that fires every other week. Context first, then read the week.
Wayback
Re-open any past week exactly as the engine saw it.
Wayback steps the dashboard back in time. Pick any weekly report from the last seven years and the asset re-renders with the data, signals and COTflow Insight as they stood that Friday — no hindsight, no revision.
- Walk the weekly snapshots — every report since the history begins, one click apart.
- See which signals were active on any past week, not just the current one.
- Validate a setup — check what the engine actually flagged before a move, instead of trusting memory.
- Understand a historical episode — replay how an extreme built, peaked and unwound week by week.
Two ways in: open Wayback from the main menu and step through any past week, or navigate directly from the episode panel in Asset Profile.
Signal library
What triggers each signal and how to read it.
Universal signals can appear on any asset, any week — they reflect positioning behaviour that crosses all markets. The three below are always active in the detection engine regardless of asset class.
Core Signals
Pole-specific signals only fire on certain markets. They encode structural behaviours unique to each asset class — a Commodities signal means something different from a Crypto signal. Same logic, different context.
Momentum Signals
Commercial Extremes
Institutional vs Speculative
Institutional Entry
When multiple signals would fire on the same asset in the same week, more specific signals override the generic ◈ Positioning Extreme. The detection engine resolves these conflicts before display.
| Trigger | Suppresses | Scope | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| ↕ Flip on primary actor | ◈ Positioning Extreme | All markets | The flip IS the first move in the new direction — showing both is incoherent. |
| ⏬ Heavy Hedging | ◈ Positioning Extreme | Commodities | Pole-specific signal is more precise than the generic extreme. |
| ↘ Hedging Easing | ◈ Positioning Extreme | Commodities | Pole-specific signal is more precise than the generic extreme. |
| 🏦 Institutional Entry | ◈ Positioning Extreme | Crypto | Dominant signal by definition — overrides everything else. |
Technical reference
For when you want to understand the engine.
COT Index — Formula & thresholds
Formula: percentile of this week's net within the last 52 weeks of nets for the primary actor. (current − min) / (max − min) × 100.
Range: 0% (lowest net in 52 weeks) to 100% (highest).
Thresholds:
- • > 85% — stretched. For Forex / Indices / Bonds / Crypto: stretched bullish. For Commodities (inverted): maximal hedging — a positioning state, not a top.
- • < 15% — stretched low. For Forex / Indices / Bonds / Crypto: stretched bearish. For Commodities (inverted): minimal hedging — a positioning low, not a floor.
It's a vigilance signal, not a reversal signal. Extremes can persist for weeks. The actual reversal cue is the first week of reduction at an extreme — read with the ∆net of the current week.
Open Interest — 8 combinations
Net POSITIVE (bullish bias):
| |net| | OI | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| ↑ | ↑ | Healthy trend — fresh bullish capital, new buyers entering. |
| ↑ | ↓ | Fragile momentum — rally via short covering, no new buyers. |
| ↓ | ↑ | Resistance — sellers entering against the bullish trend. |
| ↓ | ↓ | Profit taking — bulls reducing, partial exhaustion. |
Net NEGATIVE (bearish bias):
| |net| | OI | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| ↑ | ↑ | Bearish buildup — fresh capital selling, conviction building. |
| ↑ | ↓ | Fragile bearish momentum — decline via long liquidation, no new sellers. |
| ↓ | ↑ | Short covering — bears covering, potential rebound. |
| ↓ | ↓ | Bearish exhaustion — bears reducing, potential bottom. |
Flip preemption: if the primary actor's net sign changed this week, the |net| comparison spans the flip and is invalid. The dashboard shows ↕ Regime change instead of a matrix cell.
Directional dot — trigger table
| Dot | Trigger | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Primary actor net long (or Commodities COT Index < 15%) | Bullish | |
| Primary actor net short (or Commodities COT Index > 85%) | Bearish | |
| Primary actor net sign changed vs last week | Flip — takes priority | |
| Flat / insufficient history / Commodities mid-range | Neutral |
Commodities exception: the dot is computed on COT Index inversion, not on the raw net sign — because Commercials are structurally net short and the trader's bias signal is the percentile, not the absolute direction.
AM/LF Ratio — reference table
Formula: (AM long + AM short) / (LF long + LF short). Measures who dominates the contract by gross volume.
| Ratio | Reading |
|---|---|
| ≥ 2× | AM dominates. Primary signal reliable. |
| 1× – 2× | Near parity. Conviction weakened — confirm with price action. |
| < 1× | LF dominates. Speculative-driven — warning, primary signal less reliable. |
Reference: on Forex, AM is typically 3–5× LF. A 1×–2× ratio on Forex is itself a flag — the contract is being run by speculatives, not institutionals.
Flip thresholds by market
A flip is only flagged if the net sign change is also above a minimum magnitude — otherwise tiny zero-crossings would generate noise.
| Market | Threshold (contracts) |
|---|---|
| Forex | 5,000 |
| Indices | 10,000 |
| Bonds | 20,000 |
| Commodities | 5,000 |
| Crypto | 500 |
A true flip needs at least one of the two weeks above the threshold — the move only has to be substantial on one side (the prior week or the current one). A reduction that crosses zero into a sizeable new position therefore counts as a real flip. Only a symmetric zero-wobble — where both weeks sit below the threshold — is read as a directional build from near-neutral, not a regime flip: there the data column shows the directional arrow (↓ / ↑ by the new net's sign) instead of ↕, the dot reads bearish / bullish rather than flip, and the week surfaces as a ∆ Move, not a Flip.
Asset-specific context
Commodities — who is "Commercials"? The actor mapped to Commercials differs by asset. Gold, Silver and the grains (Wheat, Corn, Soybeans) use PMPU (Producer / Merchant / Processor / User — real physical hedgers: miners, refiners, farmers, processors). Oil uses Swap Dealers (financial intermediaries hedging OTC / index exposure) but sits structurally net short like a producer, so the same inverted hedging logic applies.
NatGas and Copper are different — Swap Dealers, net long. Their primary actor is also Swap Dealers, but here that book is structurally net long (financial intermediary, not a producer hedging). So we read them without hedging language and without a long/short direction: a COT extreme is shown as ◈ Extreme — a rare positioning state / context, neither directional nor contrarian. The net sign lives in the numbers only.
Hedger extremes are not contrarian. A commodity can sit at a record short for years while price keeps rising (Gold ran ×2.25 from 2020–26 with Commercials record-short the whole way). Read a commodity COT extreme as context / rarity — where the hedgers stand in their historical range — never as a price top or floor.
Grains seasonality: USDA WASDE reports and harvest cycles (Corn/Soybeans Sept–Nov, Wheat May–Jul) create temporary positioning extremes — weight them lighter than on metals.
AUD = China demand + commodity sentiment proxy. AM long AUD = risk-on bias, bullish industrial commodities.
CAD = Crude Oil WTI proxy. AM long CAD + AM long Oil = aligned signal; divergence between the two = warning.
Treasury curve (10Y vs 30Y):
- • Long 10Y + Long 30Y = rate cut anticipation (parallel shift down).
- • Long 30Y + Short 10Y = curve steepening (growth / reflation view).
- • Short 30Y + Long 10Y = curve flattening (recession hedge).
- • Maturity disagreement = curve view, not a directional rates view.
JPY / CHF chart note: CME contracts are XXX/USD. AM net long JPY = USD/JPY falling. Don't confuse contract direction with displayed pair direction.
Cash & Carry — Crypto
On Bitcoin, ETH, Solana and XRP CME futures, Leveraged Funds are often net short — not because they're bearish, but because they're running a basis trade: buy spot, sell futures to capture the positive futures premium.
Practical consequences:
- • LF short ≠ bearish conviction on crypto. Ignore for direction.
- • Alignment badge restricted — only triggers on long-side AM+LF alignment. Short-side alignment is structural arbitrage, not consensus.
- • Real bullish signal: AM net long + OI surging = fresh institutional capital entering the asset.
- • Real bearish signal: AM flip net short + OI rising = institutionals actively exiting.
Crypto has limited COT history (a few years) — mean-reversion signals from COT Index are less reliable here than on Forex or Commodities. Treat AM flip as the dominant confirmation signal.