equities

Below is a weekly chart of the past 3 years of the E-mini S&P500 index traded as ES on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange futures market. The red volume bars represent the amount of S&P 500 futures contracts traded each week, where each contract actually represents 50 S&P500 shares. The average volume of the E-mini S&P500 traded each week equates to over $500 billion USD, and it is one of the most actively traded financial instruments in the world, acting as an important gauge of the world's largest economy.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) each week releases the Commitments of Traders report, which details the held positions of 3 different classes of traders, indicated in the chart below as COT Net Position. There exists the commercial hedgers (gray), the large/institutional speculators (green), and the general public small/retail speculators (magenta).