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As we do at the start of each week, in Monday's Closer we recapped the latest positioning data from the CFTC's Commitments of Traders report. In essence, this data highlights whether traders are in aggregate positioned long or short in various futures contracts. In the charts below, we show the historical net percentage of open interest net long (short) for gold and silver futures. Higher positive readings indicate that positioning is net long (more longs than shorts), while negative readings indicate that positioning is net short (more shorts than longs).

Last week's data saw a number of big moves in commodity futures, but some of the most notable were in the precious metal space. For starters, silver rose to 41.5% net long. That makes for the most optimistic positioning since April 2017. As gold continues to trade at record highs, traders have gotten extremely long at 57.7%, which is a record high in this series dating back to 1986!

As shown above, last week's record high in gold positioning isn't the first of the year. So far in 2024, there have been five weeks with record highs. As shown below, that is the largest number of record highs since 2009 when there were six.

Again, the new high in gold positioning comes as gold itself is trading at record highs. In the chart below, we show the price of gold during the history of the Commitments of Traders data and plot each time that positioning was also at a record high. Of these occurrences since 2000, gold has usually been trending higher when gold long positioning reaches a record. That was also the case in the 1980s, albeit that was early on in the CFTC data's history, and as such, back then the net long readings were significantly lower than they are now. The 1990s were a bit different as the strong reads on positioning came at a time when gold was sitting in a downtrend.

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