Forex Sentiment Data

Biggest movers

The pairs whose retail positioning shifted most since the start of the current trading day.

Reading it:

• A positive number means retail got more long; negative means more short.
• The second line is the current long / short split.

Using it:

• Large shifts often mark crowd momentum building.
• Contrarian read: when retail piles into one side, look for setups the other way.
• A sentiment shift straight after a large price move can signal exhaustion.

Currency sentiment

The overall long / short bias for each individual currency, aggregated across every pair that contains it.

How it is built:

• Traders long EUR/USD are bullish EUR and bearish USD.
• That is averaged across all pairs holding the currency.
• A higher number means retail is more bullish on that currency overall.

Using it:

• Pair the strongest against the weakest currency for the cleanest setups.
• Contrarian read: a currency above 70 is crowded long — look for weakness.

The second figure on each tile is that central bank's current policy rate — see central bank rates for history and next meetings. The pair table's Carry column is the base rate minus the quote rate — roughly what you earn (positive) or pay (negative) per year to hold the pair long, before spreads.

Sentiment and carry together are more interesting than either alone: a crowded short on a strongly positive-carry pair means the crowd is paying to hold that position.

Retail vs institutions

The same eight currencies seen from both sides of the market.

• Retail is the aggregate long % from this site's own sentiment data, updated every fifteen minutes.
• Funds net is the CFTC non-commercial net position — large speculators, long minus short, in contracts. It is a Tuesday snapshot published the following Friday, so it is always a few days behind.
• 3y range shows where that net sits inside its own three-year high-to-low range. The centre tick is the midpoint. Raw net cannot be compared between currencies, because contract sizes and open interest differ — the range position can.

The Read column:

• Opposed — retail and the funds are on opposite sides. That is the interesting row, because the two groups disagree. It is not a prediction: we tested whether the crowd is wrong at extremes and could not reproduce it.
• Aligned — both sides agree, which is less informative in either direction.
• Retail neutral — retail sits between 45 and 55, so it has no real bias to compare.

Note the dollar row uses the ICE Dollar Index, since there is no US dollar currency future. Its contract size differs from the others, so read its range position rather than its raw net.