Commodities CFTC report: oil longs exiting - TDS

Analysts at TD Securities offered a breakdown of the CFTC Commitment of Traders Report for the week ending February 16th, 2015.

Key Quotes:

Massive short-covering by platinum specs last week. During the price decline from $1500/oz to $1000/oz, spec shorts added 30k lots (from 6k to 36k total position). But in the early year price dip close to $800/oz shorts were covering positions, and even more so, with roughly 10k lots covered just in the last two weeks, as prices rallied back up to $960/oz. Clearly, with precious metals receiving a bid, good auto sales growth, and a deficit supply/demand balance, specs are very nervous to be short at Great Recession lows.


Crude oil specs sharply abandoned their push further into record long positioning (down 10% of the long open interest), as bets that consensus was forming on coordinated OPEC/Russia action fizzled out. This was correctly timed as the group could not even cobble together an agreement to freeze production levels, with Iran and Iraq refusing to cooperate. However, sliding production in the US added some support, and kept prices range bound over the past month. Shorts are still overwhelming negative, up 360% since before the 2014 price rout began."