Trading glossary & guides

19 guides covering positioning, market structure, risk, and platform methodology. Free to read.

• COT — Weekly CFTC report showing how commercials, large specs, and small traders are positioned in futures markets.
• COT Score — PositionAlpha’s −100 to +100 summary of commercial, non-commercial, and small-trader positioning changes.
• Commercial Traders — Producers, merchants, and end-users who hedge with futures — often treated as informed “smart money.”
• Non-Commercial Traders — Large specs and money managers who trade futures for profit rather than physical hedging.
• Small Traders — Non-reportable retail-sized futures positions — often used as a soft contrarian crowd gauge.
• Seasonality — Recurring calendar tendencies in prices driven by weather, demand cycles, and market structure.
• Market Regime — Whether a market is trending up, trending down, or consolidating — based on trend and volatility indicators.
• Sentiment Analysis — Measuring crowd mood from news, votes, and positioning — useful as context and sometimes as a contrarian cue.
• Open Interest — Outstanding futures contracts that have not been settled — a gauge of participation and liquidity.
• Contrarian Indicator — Signals that suggest fading the crowd when positioning or sentiment reaches an extreme.
• Smart Money — Shorthand for better-informed participants — often mapped to commercial hedgers in COT analysis.
• Position Sizing — How much capital to risk on a trade — the bridge between a signal and account survival.
• Risk Management — Rules that protect capital: stops, total exposure limits, and positive expectancy habits.
• Technical Analysis — Studying price, volume, and indicators to time entries and manage risk around a directional bias.
• Fundamental Analysis — Evaluating supply, demand, inventories, and macro drivers that shape a commodity’s fair value path.
• How PositionAlpha Scores Work — How COT Scores, confluence tiers, and factor weights turn raw data into readable market intelligence.
• Today's Focus — Daily shortlist of markets where primary factors — especially COT and seasonality — are directional.
• Free vs Premium Data — What you can browse publicly, what free sign-in unlocks, and what Premium adds.
• Reading Regimes on PositionAlpha — How to interpret trending versus consolidating regime tiles next to COT and seasonality.