6 positioning triggers fired across 31 futures markets in this week's Commitments of Traders report, covering 11 August 2026. 16 markets are holding speculative positioning within 20 percentage points of an all-time extreme.
New Zealand Dollar speculative positioning sits below the 1st percentile of its all-time range.
Copper speculative positioning sits at the 96th percentile of its all-time range.
Sugar saw the week's largest positioning change, speculators having added 136,804 contracts.
Which positioning triggers fired this week
A trigger fires when a trader cohort's net position reaches a defined threshold. The count is how many times the same trigger has fired in that market since 2010.
Active historical analog triggers - Week 33 - RTY, HG, SB
Where positioning is most stretched
Low end of the historical range: New Zealand Dollar (below the 1st percentile), Canadian Dollar (at the 1st percentile), Nasdaq 100 (at the 2nd percentile), 10-Year T-Note (at the 3rd percentile), Russell 2000 (at the 9th percentile). High end of the historical range: Copper (at the 96th percentile), Soybean Oil (at the 89th percentile), Cotton (at the 87th percentile), Soybean Meal (at the 85th percentile), British Pound (at the 82nd percentile).
A percentile carries no direction on its own. It states where the current net position sits within everything that cohort has held in that market since the data begins, and nothing more.
What happened the last time positioning looked like this
That is the question this week's analogs letter answers. For every trigger above it lists every previous firing since 2010, with the forward return at 1, 2, 4, 8, 12 and 26 weeks, the deepest fall and the highest rise along the way, and the calendar seasonal for the same week — so the median sits beside the dispersion it came from rather than standing in for it.
Returns are computed on a back-adjusted continuous price series built from a committed roll ledger, so a contract change is never counted as a price move. No price levels are shown, because an adjusted level is not a quote.
This week's letters
These letters describe what positioning is and what price did after comparable positioning in the past. They contain no forecasts and no recommendations.