The CFTC is not only expanding the universe of markets it oversees, it also is expanding the scope of oversight it extends over U.S. markets with the implementation of one new report and proposal of another. The goal of both reports is to increase transparency in the marketplace.

On July 22, the CFTC implemented the Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) report that builds on improvements to transparency created last year through disaggregated data in the CFTC’s weekly Commitments of Traders (COT) reports (See "Using COT data to find major opportunities"). Whereas the COT report provided the futures market with aggregate data concerning the position data of large traders, the TFF report goes a step further by breaking traders into four categories: Dealer/Intermediary, Asset Manager/Institutional, Leveraged Funds, and Other Reportables.

The TFF will be published concurrently with the COT report and provides a breakdown of each Tuesday’s open interest for markets.

To further increase transparency in the markets, the CFTC submitted for comment the Account Ownership and Control Report (OCR) on July 12. Whereas the TFF is a report released by the CFTC, the OCR is a report the CFTC wants to require of exchanges and futures commission merchants to gather more information about the identity of traders in the marketplace.

Currently, when the CFTC is collecting data from the exchanges, traders are only identified by trader account number. With the OCR, the CFTC wants to expand that identification information by including trading account numbers, the names and addresses of accounts’ owners and controllers, owners’ and controllers’ dates of birth and other information necessary to uniquely identify owners and controllers to identify related trading accounts.

The proposal was submitted with a 60-day comment period.

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