Partnered With:

Combing through CME's bitcoin holdings data, traditional players are starting to reduce their short positions

Read this article in 8 Minutes

Money managers and institutions are increasing their long bitcoin positions

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), founded in 1874, is a trading platform for commodities, energy, interest rates, metals, stock indexes and cryptocurrency futures. At present, CME has become one of the largest financial derivatives trading platforms in the world.

Compared to other trading platforms that focus on cryptocurrency trading and crypto derivatives trading, CME is a compliant platform that is overseen by regulators. On December 18, 2017, CME officially launched the bitcoin futures contract, giving money management institutions and hedge funds a channel to enter the crypto industry.

Of course, there are investors who believe the launch of futures on the CME and CBOE indirectly helped bring the bull market to an early end. Just six days after the CBOE futures launch and two days before the CME futures launch, the price of bitcoin hit a multi-year high, according to Coinbase, and it didn't break through until December 2020.

Based on volume, CME holdings don't seem to affect bitcoin's price. But the CME's players are big players in the capital markets, and their influence is not to be underestimated.

Because bitcoin futures on the CME are not traded around the clock like in the crypto industry, they are prone to jump openings after the weekend. Because of the influence of CME bitcoin futures, the price of bitcoin is often affected by gaps. Of course, historical data are of limited use in determining future prices, and cannot determine the probability of the next gap to be covered.

Thanks to the Commodity Futures Commission (CFTC) 's weekly position report, we can get a glimpse of the change in the CME's bitcoin futures players' positions, the change in the proportion of various positions, and the change in the number of traders.

Latest CFTC Position Report

CFTC will participate in the CME bitcoin futures contract users divided into "Dealer/Intermediary (Dealer/Intermediary)", "Asset Manager/Institutional", "Leveraged fund (Leveraged) Funds, Other reportables, and Nonreportable Positions. Dealers/intermediaries generally refer to banks and brokers; Asset management/institutions generally refer to hedge funds, funds traded on trading platforms; Leveraged funds generally refer to smaller private funds; Other dealers generally refer to large accounts with large amounts of capital; Non-report position is to point to the small retail investor of capital quantity.

CME's current holdings of bitcoin contracts are worth about $1.413 billion, according to BYBT. Leverage funds are the largest holders of CME bitcoin futures, with $448 million in long positions and $862 million in short positions, according to the latest CFTC data. (Note: $1.413 billion in open positions means $1.413 billion in short and $1.413 billion in long positions.)

Changes in CME's bitcoin holdings over the last 4 months

In order to better measure the relationship between CME's bitcoin holdings and the price of bitcoin, Rupate Blockbeats statistics the change of CME's bitcoin holdings in the last four months:

From this data, we can draw two sets of conclusions that are relatively correlated.

Leveraged funds are scaling back their bets against bitcoin

According to the CFTC report date and the Bitcoin UTC +0 time of the day, there is a strong correlation between the Bitcoin market and the short positions of leveraged funds. At the same time, on current data, leveraged funds are reducing their short BTC positions, which have fallen to their lowest since March.

Money managers and institutions are increasing their long bitcoin positions

Coincidentally, asset management and institutions to do long Bitcoin positions and Bitcoin market there is a strong correlation. For now, money managers and institutions are increasing their long bitcoin positions. Data on June 15 showed that money managers and institutions are at their highest positions long bitcoin since March.