cot-contrarian-detector
COT Contrarian Detector
Overview
Implements step 1 of Jason Shapiro's COT (Commitment of Traders) contrarian process: detect when large speculators are crowded into one side of a futures market. Crowded positioning is a precondition for a contrarian trade, not a trade signal — a market only becomes tradable once crowding is confirmed by a news failure and price-action reversal (steps 2-3), which this skill guides the user through manually.
Core thesis (Shapiro): Large speculators (hedge funds, CTAs, momentum traders) tend to be maximally positioned at trend exhaustion, not trend inception. When they are already crowded onto one side, the next big move is statistically more likely to run them over than to reward them further. Fade the speculators, not the commercials (commercials hedge for structural reasons and are not a crowd-psychology signal).