Weekly CFTC Net Speculator Gold Report
Gold positions up five out of the last six weeks
GOLD: Large futures traders and gold speculators continued to increase their overall bullish bets in gold for the fifth time out of the last six weeks last week, 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 +122,178 contracts in the data reported through January 6th. This was a weekly change of +6,341 contracts from the previous week’s total of +115,837 net contracts that was registered on December 30th.
The rise in the net speculator positions (+6,341 contracts) was due to a gain in the weekly bullish positions by +4,808 contracts combined with a decrease in the gold bearish positions by -1,533 contracts.
Gold speculative positions are now at their highest level since August 19th when positions equaled +137,976 contracts.
Over the weekly reporting time-frame, from Tuesday December 30th to Tuesday January 6th, the gold price rose from approximately $1,200.40 to $1,219.40 per ounce, according to gold futures price data from investing.com.
*COT Report: 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).