I Got Tired of Wrestling CFTC Spreadsheets, So I Built COT Edge

For a long time I had no idea how to read the fundamental side of the market. There's so much of it everywhere that I didn't even know where to start.

Finding the one report that actually showed me something

Then I found the COT report, the one place that shows the actual number of positions across different instruments, what the big players are really doing with their money. Not opinions, not narratives. Real positions, updated every week. It felt like finally seeing behind the curtain.

The problem was doing it by hand

But putting that analysis together by hand was rough. The raw report looks like it's straight out of the 90s, packed with endless rows of numbers, pure chaos. By the time I'd connected it all and reasoned out a clear read, a good 20 minutes were gone. And that was for just one pair.

Then I had to repeat the whole thing on the next one. And even then, it was never as fast or as accurate as it is now.

So I built the thing I needed

So I built COT Edge, mainly for myself. The idea was simple: take the exact workflow I was grinding through by hand and automate it. Pull the live CFTC data, calculate the net positioning, and show the percentile context automatically, so I could see at a glance whether positioning was actually extreme without touching a spreadsheet.

I use it actively every week. It's not a side project I shipped and forgot, it's a core part of how I trade now.

What changed

Since I've had it, two things have gone up: my own win rate, and my control over the whole fundamental side of my trading. I stopped guessing at the macro picture and started reading it directly from what the big money was doing.

That's the whole reason COT Edge exists. It's the tool I wished I'd had when I was staring at those raw CFTC spreadsheets, wondering where to even begin.