BTC CME Futures Positioning (weekly): -7.6K
Who is long and who is short bitcoin futures on the Chicago exchange, split into the four kinds of big trader the US regulator counts. One point per week — the CFTC publishes it every Friday for the previous Tuesday.
Every bitcoin futures contract open at the CME is held by someone. Once a week the US futures regulator, the CFTC, counts the large holders and sorts them into four groups: hedge funds (the report calls them 'leveraged money'), asset managers (pension funds, mutual funds, insurers), dealers (the banks and brokers who sell futures to clients and hedge what they sold), and other large traders.
Each line is that group's net position — its long contracts minus its short contracts. One contract is 5 bitcoin.
Above zero a group owns more upside than downside; **below** zero it is net short. For example, in the report for 21 July 2026 hedge funds were net short 7,949 contracts (about 39,700 bitcoin) while asset managers were net long 2,727. That is the ordinary shape of this market rather than a crash warning: hedge funds mostly run the basis trade — buy spot bitcoin or a spot ETF, sell a future against it, collect the price gap — so their short side grows when that gap is wide, not when they turn bearish.
Asset managers are the line closest to plain conviction, because they are usually long and unhedged. Read the direction each line is travelling before you read its level.
For each weekly report: net = that group's long contracts minus its short contracts, exactly as the CFTC prints them. Spread positions (long one month and short another at the same time) sit in their own CFTC column and are not folded in here.
Nothing is interpolated between report dates — a week missing a leg is dropped whole rather than patched.
WEEKLY and late. Positions are measured at Tuesday's close and published the following Friday afternoon, so the newest point is three days old the moment it appears and is up to ten days old by the end of the week. This **is not** a daily chart and must not be read as one.
It covers the standard 5-bitcoin CME contract **only** — the Micro Bitcoin contract, and the Cboe and Coinbase Derivatives contracts, are separate reports and are not added in. Traders too small to be reportable (roughly 4% of open interest) are outside the count. History starts 10 April 2018, the first week the CFTC broke bitcoin out on its own.
CFTC Public Reporting Environment, 'Traders in Financial Futures — Futures Only' (Socrata dataset gpe5-46if), contract BITCOIN — CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE, market code 133741. Free public data, no key; we re-read it daily and store every week since 2018.
CFTC Commitments of Traders · free public data · 1 point per WEEK (Tuesday positions, published Friday) · full history since 2018-04-10