CFTC: Your COT Data is Still Incomplete! Please Advise

The U.S. government shutdown may have been over for a week, but the Commodity Futures Trading Commission still hasn't reported in full its weekly Commitments of Traders data since the shutdown started.

That means the data for the recent period is pretty much useless for analysis and transparency purposes.

This week, the CFTC inexplicably has posted not the current week's trader positioning - but instead, trader positioning from the week of Oct. 1. That was the first week of the shutdown.

No doubt trading firms still reported their positioning to the CFTC during the shutdown. So I would presume the data exists somewhere in the bowels of the CFTC.

Let the CFTC Know You Care

The question is, why isn't the CFTC disclosing it?

Will the CFTC do so? If so, when? If not, why not?

No word on any of this on the CFTC's website.

I have written to the CFTC at marketreports@cftc.gov to ask what's going on.

And if you care about this data, please do so too and encourage the CFTC to promptly report the missing data.

Until the remaining data is disclosed, I'll have to continue avoiding updating my signals. Or I can wait until the moving average periods for my setups run out and then start trading with the data again.

But even if I do that, any historic analysis or backtesting of trading signals will be severely impaired if the missing data isn't eventually filled in. I hope the CFTC finds the time to do so!

UPDATE (Oct. 28): Just hear back from the CFTC. They are pledging to release the missing data over the next couple of weeks in an updated COT release schedule available here.