COT reading is 100 or 62 depending on a setting you never choseGold FuturesCOMEX_DL:GC1!NightbricksGold positioning this week reads at the absolute ceiling, or comfortably mid-range, and the only thing that changes between those two answers is a lookback setting most people never touch. The COT Index is the standard normalisation. Larry Williams' formula: rescale the net position onto 0 to 100 against the highest and lowest readings in a lookback window. Williams originally used three years, later moved to 26 weeks, and 26 weeks is what most free indicators shipped with and never revisited. Same gold data, this week's CFTC file, two windows: 26-week window: 100.0. The most crowded long the window has ever seen. 156-week window: 61.6. Moderately above average, nowhere near an extreme. A trader acting on the first number is fading a record. A trader acting on the second is not doing anything at all. Both are reading "the COT Index". Gold is not a special case. Run the same comparison across the largest futures markets and the gaps are everywhere. Cocoa reads 65.4 on 26 weeks against 11.9 on three years, mid-range against nearly on the floor. Silver, 66.7 against 38.3. Nasdaq, 82.8 against 48.4. British pound, 100.0 against 63.0. I checked how often each window saturates, meaning it sits at exactly 0 or exactly 100 and has therefore stopped conveying information. Across the largest markets with a full history, 156 weekly reports each, 2,808 observations: 26-week window: pinned at a boundary in 20.6 percent of readings. 156-week window: pinned in 8.8 percent. One reading in five from the standard setting is stuck against a wall. After a quiet six months that is a very low bar to clear, and it is exactly when a short window manufactures an extreme that is not there. This is a real trade-off, not a mistake. A short window tracks the current regime and reacts fast. A long window survives regime change and makes a reading of 100 rare enough to mean something. Neither is universally right. What is wrong is quoting an index reading without its window. Check what yours is set to. If you did not choose it, it is 26. The pane on this chart is COT Index Lite, the free script I publish. It has no lookback input at all, on purpose. It is welded to 156 weeks so that a reading near 100 stays rare enough to be worth acting on, and so that nobody inherits a setting they never chose. You are free to think that is the wrong call. The point is that you can see what the call was.