The five categories in the report sum to zero, because every long is somebody’s short. That accounting identity is the most useful feature of the release: once you know where the demand is not, you know where it has been parked.
+4,561
Dealers, bitcoin
+5,425
Asset managers, bitcoin
−10,360
Leveraged funds, bitcoin
−60
Non-reportable
Source: CFTC Commitments of Traders, Traders in Financial Futures, futures only. Prices are Coinbase daily closes. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Asset managers and dealers, CME bitcoin futures
Solid line: asset managers. Dashed: dealers. Net contracts, weekly.
Source: CFTC Commitments of Traders, Traders in Financial Futures, futures only. Prices are Coinbase daily closes. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
One trade, counted twice
The long-standing structure of this market is asset managers long and leveraged funds short, and those are not two opposing views. They are the two legs of a cash and carry trade, in which one party holds the asset and sells the future against it to capture the spread. Reading the leveraged short as a bearish bet is the most common error made with this data.
How this was measured
- Figures are taken from the CFTC’s Commitments of Traders release, Traders in Financial Futures, futures only. That report covers positions held at the close on a Tuesday and is published the following Friday at 15:30 Eastern, so every reading here is three days old on the day it appears. Net positions exclude spread holdings, which the CFTC reports separately. Notional values apply the CME contract multiplier and the Coinbase daily close on the report date. Restatements by the CFTC are carried through rather than footnoted.
