Quick definitions for terms used across the dashboard and market pages — the same concepts, explained once instead of scattered across tooltips.

Non-Commercial

Large speculators — hedge funds, CTAs, and managed money. Trade for profit, not to manage physical business risk. This is the group whose campaign-reducing phase is the one signal this project has actually validated against price.

Commercial

Producers, merchants, and hedgers managing real business risk (e.g. a miner hedging future gold production). Often positioned opposite to Non-Commercial extremes, but not reliably a timing signal on its own.

Long / Short

Gross positions, tracked separately for each group. This app deliberately never nets these into a single "Long minus Short is all you need" number for display — Long and Short each carry their own information (e.g. a group can add to both sides at once via spreading).

Net

Long minus Short for one group. Positive = net long, negative = net short. Used for direction and campaign tracking, but the underlying gross Long/Short are shown too rather than net-only.

Open Interest (OI)

Total outstanding contracts across all participants in a market. Rising OI alongside a growing position usually reads as fresh conviction; falling OI alongside a shrinking position usually reads as existing positions unwinding rather than new selling.

Illustrative example

Rising OI + growing position -> fresh conviction

Falling OI + shrinking position -> unwinding

Total Difference

Non-Commercial Net minus Commercial Net — how far apart speculators and hedgers are positioned. Crosses zero, so its own week-over-week % change is suppressed on the dashboard when the baseline is too close to zero to be meaningful.

Campaign

A detected, sustained move in one group's Net position — has a start date, a start/current/peak value, an age in weeks, and a phase (Early → Building → Accelerating → Mature → Distributing → Unwinding → Complete). Reducing (Distributing/Unwinding) is the phase this project's own research found a real, replicated relationship to price for.

The real 7-phase cycle this app computes

Early→Building→Accelerating→Mature→Distributing→Unwinding→Complete

Extreme / "% from max"

How close a group's current Long or Short sits to its own historical high. Shown two ways on the market page: All-Time Max (the true record) and 3-Year Max (a rolling 156-week window, the industry-standard "COT Index" convention). Neither has been shown to predict a subsequent price move on its own — it's positioning context, not a signal.

Illustrative example -- not a live reading

FlatHistorical extreme

Report cadence

The CFTC's COT report reflects positions as of the prior Tuesday and is published the following Friday. "This week's report" always describes Wednesday–Tuesday, not the days since publication.

One report week