TradeStation has announced it will now offer clients integrated Commitments of Traders (COT) data at no additional cost for use in analyzing futures markets and creating, back-testing and executing futures trading strategies.

The information on purchase and sales of futures contracts is provided by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) weekly. COT data gives a detailed breakdown on the number of futures contracts held long, short or spread by commercial traders, non-commercial traders and other speculative traders.

This information can be used to show which groups of traders have a position bias in a market direction, which groups may be driving the market trend and which groups are increasing or decreasing position size.