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Commitment of Traders Plug-in
COT Data Tab
Video Transcript
In this Track 'n Trade Pro trading training video, I want to talk to you about the Commitment of Traders Data Tab.
I don't want everybody to get confused on how we do the data or how the chart is drawn . First of all, let's come into the Data Tab and I want to show you something. I'm going to stretch this out so we can see all of the contracts. I want to still have a little bit of chart here, so you can still see what I'm talking about.
When we come down through this data tab on the Commitment of Traders, we have the date that we received the information from the government. Then we go across the top, you'll notice how they're all indicated. The first one is C-Long, which stands for the Commercials. How many commercials are long, how many commercials are short, and then how many commercials are bullish in a percentile. Now, it's this percentile that we're charting over here.
We take the number of longs vs. the number of shorts and it gives us a percentage that are long. That's why you have 56% bullish, therefore on the commercials you're going to get on this date, a red line going above the zero. It's not that we look at this chart, and we see all these red lines going down or we look at this chart, and we see all the blue lines going up. It's not that all of the large speculators are buying, or it's not that all the commercials are selling, it's just that a larger percentage in relationship to the overall number of traders in the market that are going long or short.
Here's the large commercial traders long and large commercial traders short. Here's the percentage that are bullish. Let's scoot down through here a little bit towards the end of this contract. I want to look back, let's look about right in this area. Notice that this is where, in this little window that I have here, we have a lot of blue up and we have a lot of green down, and we have a lot of red down. This means that the large speculators are long, and the large commercials are short. So they're selling to each other and buying and selling to each other, so that's good. But all the little small speculators are short, which means of course, in an uptrend that their losing money. But now, not all are losing money. Just a larger percent are losing than making money.
Let's look at these small speculators, since those are the guys we're the most concerned about. We're going to look right around in the March time frame. Let's look at 3 2004, and that's in this time frame right in here. You'll notice that 44% are bullish. Well, that means that about a little less than 60% are bearish. That's why we're getting the little green markers pointing down. Because there are more people of the small speculators that are losing money than they are making money. But it's 44%, now the next day is the next report is 44%, then we have 45% are bullish, the we have 46% that are bullish in the small speculators.
That's less than half, so that's why we get the green pointing down, because more people are losing money than making money. So when people tell you hey, 80% of all small speculators lose money, you can say no, that's not true. I can go to my Commitment of Traders right here, and in the period between February and March, only about 45% of them were losing money. This way you can see the different percentages of bullish and bearish vs the shorts and longs of the large speculators and the large commercials.
Of course, you can export all this data and chart it in some other application, too. For example: if you like to do data mining or manipulate data in Microsoft Excel and some other spreadsheet type program, you can just simply highlight this data like this, holding down the Shift key, just like any other traditional Microsoft application. Or you can just hit Control A, of course, and that selects all the data. Then you can hit Control C, which is the standard industry, standard, you know, method of doing a copy. You can copy that data out to the clipboard and then paste it into your Excel spreadsheet.
That's how we use the Data Tab or that's how the Data Tab is integrated into Track 'n Trade Pro.