Our treatment of open interest would not be complete without mentioning the Commitments of Traders (COT) Report, and how it is used by futures technicians as a forecasting tool. The report is released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) twice a month—a mid-month report and one at month's end. The report breaks down the open interest numbers into three cate­gories—large hedgers, large speculators, and small traders. The large hedgers, also called commercials, use the futures markets primarily for hedging purposes. Large speculators include the large commodity funds, who rely primarily on mechanical trend-following systems. The final category of small traders includes the general public, who trade in much smaller amounts