Banks, funds reverse earlier outlooks on gold futures - CFTC

The Commitment of Traders report published on Friday by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission showed banks, known in the report as Swap Dealers, increased their long coverage and reduced their shorts.

This came as Managed Money firms, which denotes hedge funds, pensions and Commodity Trading Advisers (CTAs), reduced their long positions and increased their short coverage.

The CFTC report suggests that banks increased last week their long positions by 10% to 39,607 positions and reduced their shorts by 3.7% to 249,567 positions.

Meanwhile, the funds and CTAs reduced their long positions by 4.9% to 173,388 positions and increased their shorts by 5.7% to 36,003 positions.

The CFTC’s Other Reportables category, which covers proprietary traders and market-makers, sided with the funds, cutting their long positions by 3.7% to 101,889 positions and increasing their longs by 7.3% to 28,788 positions.

The CFTC, which regulates US futures and swaps, publishes at the end of each week its Commitment of Traders report that tracks the long and short positions in key US commodity and financial derivatives.

These include futures contracts traded on the main US exchanges including CME Group, Cboe Global Markets, Coinbase Derivatives, ICE Futures US, MIAX Futures and Nodal Exchange.

As well as the gold futures traded on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX), owned by CME, the CFTC CoT tracks aluminium, cobalt, copper, lithium hydroxide and steel futures traded on COMEX as well as platinum and palladium futures traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), also operated by CME.

Gold futures prices spiked in early August to an all-time high of $3,500 an ounce following a Financial Times report that gold bars would be subject to US tariffs.

Gold futures prices have since fallen back after US president said gold bars will not be tariffed.