“The United States is a distant second in mining at just 12 percent, leaving a significant gap to close. For decades, most insider trading cases have been brought under the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws, which require proof of scienter.3 For civil violations, this typically requires evidence of, at a minimum, reckless misconduct. Unlike the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws, the Martin Act has been construed to prohibit material misrepresentations or omissions without any requirement of wrongful intent.
In that case, the former CEO of Ontrak, Inc., Terren Peizer, was convicted at trial and sentenced to 42 months in prison. In January 2026, while the case was on appeal, President Trump pardoned Peizer. Exegy is a global leader in low-latency market data, trading, and execution technology—delivering innovative, end-to-end solutions that power the world’s capital markets. Backed by Marlin Equity Partners, Exegy delivers comprehensive, end-to-end infrastructure solutions to a broad spectrum of market participants, including buy-side and sell-side institutions, trading venues, and independent software vendors. This will allow clients to easily perform best price discovery, filling a structural gap in overnight markets. Axiom will also offer market data access to these ATSs with connectivity currently in development and is expected to be delivered in Q1.
Why Most Traders Struggle to Find an Edge
Understanding where your edge comes from can help you refine what to improve instead of constantly changing strategies. This distinction explains why copying strategies rarely produces the same results. It lives in the interaction between strategy, execution, and discipline.
Week-to-week changes in the COT report
Options data can generally be calculated by subtracting from the Futures and Options Combined data information set forth in the Futures report, but some information will be lost due to “spreading,” as discussed further below. Optimizing for win rate alone often leads to poor risk management. For some strategies, a 30 to 40% win rate is normal and sustainable. Risk-reward ratio compares how much you gain on winning trades relative to how much you lose on losing trades. To understand win rate properly, it must be viewed together with risk-reward ratio.
- For one of the reports, Traders in Financial Futures, traders are classified in the same category for all commodities.
- China’s expanded export controls on rare earths last year caused production delays and shutdowns for auto manufacturers in Europe and the US, and a China-generated glut of lithium has stalled plans to expand production in the US.
- Many strategies succeed with win rates below 50 percent.
The Legacy and Disaggregated reports are available in both a short and long format. The TFF report is only available in the long format. The Supplemental report is only available in the short format. Profitability depends on the balance between wins and losses.
Market Data & Economic Analysis
Generally, the data in the COT reports is from Tuesday and released Friday. The CFTC receives the data from the reporting firms on Wednesday morning and then corrects and verifies the data for release by Friday afternoon. Many strategies succeed with win rates below 50 percent. This psychological dimension explains why many traders gravitate toward high win rate strategies, even when those strategies have unfavorable long-term characteristics. In the summer of 2020, Emergent signed a $261 million contract to manufacture AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Clarity of COT Classifications
Customized data report results can be downloaded to available formats — CSV, RDF, RSS, TSV, or XML. Establishing scienter in a case where the alleged insider trades occurred pursuant to a preexisting trading plan can be challenging, particularly where the plan was put in place months earlier. Perhaps for this reason, enforcement actions involving Rule 10b5-1 plans are rare. In 2024, the DOJ succeeded in prosecuting its first ever Vega Gainlux criminal insider trading case, United States v. Peizer, based solely on trades placed pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan that was put in place while the defendant possessed material nonpublic information.