Know your data sources.

CFTC Commitments of Traders (COT): weekly futures positioning by trader group for every reportable U.S. futures market — crude oil (WTI, Brent), Henry Hub natural gas, gasoline, diesel, power, emissions, metals, grains, and financial futures. Public U.S. government data. searchMarkets finds contract market codes (WTI 067651, Henry Hub 023651, Brent 06765T, RBOB 111659, ULSD 022651). getPositions returns weekly long/short/spread positions, week-over-week changes, percent of open interest, and trader counts. getNetPositioning returns net positions per group with percentile, z-score, and COT index versus a 1-20 year lookback. Reports: disaggregated (commodities, default), legacy (all markets, 1986+), tff (financials). Positions as of Tuesday, released Friday. No setup needed.

Commodities-API — latest, historical, time-series, fluctuation, and OHLC for 80+ commodities. METHODS: getLatestPrices, getHistoricalPrices, getTimeSeries, getFluctuation, convert, getOHLC, getOilPrices, getEnergyPrices

Nasdaq Data Link (formerly Quandl) — exact time-series and metadata reads. Energy shortcuts for WTI, Henry Hub, OPEC, NG. CORE: getDataset, getDatasetMetadata, getDatabase ENERGY SHORTCUTS: getWTIFutures, getNatGasFutures, getOPECBasketPrice, getHenryHubSpot CRITICAL USAGE RULES: 1. Dataset is addressed by databaseCode + datasetCode (e.g., 'CHRIS' + 'CME_CL1') 2. Time-series filters: startDate / endDate / limit / order / collapse / transform

OilPrice.com commodity price API. Key optional for demo endpoints; required for full history and all commodity codes. LATEST: getLatestPrices, getPrice, listCommodities, getOilPrices, getGasPrices, getNGLPrices HISTORY: getPastDay, getPastWeek, getPastMonth, getPastYear

USGS MRDS + USMIN — global mineral deposits + US mine-feature points (no auth). Upstream (MapServer WFS 2.0.0): - /services/wfs/mrds — ms:mrds (~304K worldwide deposits) - /services/wfs/usmin — ms:points + ms:polygons (US only) Rich per-record JSON: /mrds/json/{dep_id} returns 26+ subtables (commodities, materials, ages, ore body, production, references, rocks). Filters: commodity (CU/AU/AG/FE/LI/U/REE/PGE…), country (FIPS), US state, dev_stat (Past Producer/Producer/Occurrence/Prospect/Plant/Raw Prospect), bbox. §0 quirks: CQL_FILTER silently ignored by MapServer — handler emits OGC FILTER= XML (fes:Filter). fips_code stored with literal "f" prefix (fCI / f06065). code_list space-separated with leading space.