The dealer map tells you how today is likely to behave. The Positioning tab tells you something slower and bigger: who is actually holding the market, and whether they are crowded.
Where it comes from
It is built from the CFTC Traders in Financial Futures report, which breaks NQ and ES positioning into cohorts:
- Dealers: the sell side.
- Asset managers: the structural long, real money.
- Leveraged funds: hedge funds and CTAs, the fast money that swings around the structural long.
The report is weekly and lagged. It is released Friday for the prior Tuesday, so it is a macro and swing layer, a different clock from the intraday map.
Three reads
- Net over time: who is long against who is short, week by week. The cohorts sum to zero, so it is a balance of positioning.
- Long vs short this week: the per-cohort split, so you see conviction, not just the net.
- Positioning extremes: each cohort's net inside its own three-year range, on a 0 to 100 index. Near 0 or 100 flags a crowded extreme.
How to use it
It is context, not a trigger. A crowded extreme measures how loaded the positioning is, not when it unwinds. Read it alongside the intraday map: the dealer flips tell you how to trade the next few hours, the cohorts tell you which way the bigger players are leaning underneath it.