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.
+4,628
Dealers, bitcoin
+7,278
Asset managers, bitcoin
−12,396
Leveraged funds, bitcoin
−105
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.
What the report cannot tell you
CME is one venue. Spot exchange traded products, offshore perpetual futures and over the counter forwards all sit outside this release, and an institution can hold a large position in any of them without appearing here. What the report measures is the part of institutional exposure that has to be declared to a United States regulator: a floor, not a total.
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.
