Gold: Gold market futures speculators decreased their overall bullish bets in the gold futures market last week following five consecutive weeks of rises that brought positions to the highest level in over a year, according to the latest Commitment of Traders (COT) data released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Friday.
The non-commercial futures contracts of Comex gold futures, traded by large speculators and hedge funds, totaled a net position of +142,458 contracts in the data reported through July 15th. This was a weekly change of -7,563 contracts from the previous week’s total of +150,021 net contracts that was registered on July 8th.
The decline in the overall net bullish speculator positions (-7,563) last week was due to a decrease in the weekly bullish positions by 3,514 contracts combined with a rise in the bearish positions by 4,049 contracts.
Last week’s slide in bullish bets breaks a string of five consecutive weekly increases that brought the overall bullish positions to a new highest level since January 22, 2013 when net bullish positions equaled 151,897 contracts.
Over the weekly same reporting time-frame, from Tuesday July 8th to Tuesday July 15th, the gold price declined for second week in a row from approximately $1,316.50 to $1,297.10 per ounce, according to gold futures price data from investing.com.
Disclaimer: The weekly commitment of traders report summarizes the total trader positions for open contracts in the futures trading markets. The CFTC categorizes trader positions according to commercial hedgers (traders who use futures contracts for hedging as part of the business), non-commercials (large traders who speculate to realize trading profits) and nonreportable traders (usually small traders/speculators).