The second most crowded speculative reading in twenty yearsSugar No. 11 FuturesICEUS_DLY:SB1!NightbricksSugar has just produced one of the most extreme positioning readings in its recorded history, and the sequence that got it there is more interesting than the reading itself. Managed money net position, from the CFTC weekly file: 28 July: net short 112,413 4 August: net short 77,814 11 August: net long 58,990 18 August: net long 151,349 25 August: net long 207,082 That is a swing of 319,495 contracts in four weekly reports. Underneath it, longs went from 181,809 to 309,452 and shorts fell from 294,222 to 102,370, so this was new buying and short covering happening at the same time, not one or the other. Open interest is the part that decides how to read it. It rose from 1,203,654 to 1,591,522 over the same four weeks, up 32 percent. A positioning flip on falling open interest is one crowd handing off to another. A flip on sharply rising open interest is new money entering, which means the position is larger and more leveraged than the net figure alone suggests. Measured against its own history, the resulting z-score is +4.07. Across 1,030 scorable weeks since June 2006 that is the second highest reading ever recorded in this market, behind only the +4.23 printed the week before. Readings past +4 have occurred in 0.19 percent of weeks. Since 2006 the z-score has first crossed +3 on only four occasions: December 2007, October 2013, October 2015, and now. Two pieces of context that stop this from being a fade. The range was set at both ends this year. The record net short in this series, 248,296 contracts, was printed on 3 March 2026. Five months later the same funds are at a top-two crowding reading. A market that travels that far that fast is not one to fade on positioning alone. And the COT Index has pinned. The pane on this chart is COT Index Lite, the free script I publish, which is fixed to a 156-week window. It reads 98.6. On the 26-week windows most free tools ship with, it reads 100. Either way it has nothing left to say, and it will keep saying roughly the same thing while the position is rebuilt. That is the honest limit of any min-max index at an extreme, and it is why from here the z-score and the weekly change in net position carry the information rather than the index line. What this reading means: the crowd is fully committed and the marginal buyer is scarce, so if a liquidation starts it has a long way to run. What it does not mean: that the liquidation starts now. Extremes persist. What I am watching is the combination that actually marks the turn, which is the z-score flattening or rolling over while open interest declines. Right now open interest is still rising, so the position is still being built.