For nearly a month they had no CoT reports because of the government shutdown, so any relative numbers will be incomplete. Only raw absolute numbers are relevant and Hamilton reports those. Ike

But rather interestingly, last month's partial government shutdown effectively shuttered the CFTC. It was deemed non-essential, which is certainly the case compared to jobs like air-traffic controllers. So for the better part of October, the CoT report vanished as CFTC employees were first furloughed and then raced to get caught up when they returned to work. They finally finished October's CoT reports this week.

And something very bullish for gold happened during that data void, American futures speculators started to buy long-side gold contracts in major quantities again. In fact, over the past couple CoT weeks (ending October 29th) futures speculators bought more long-side gold contracts than they had since back in late November 2012. Back then gold was near $1750 and 2013's crazy selling anomaly hadn't happened!

This major gold-futures buying in recent weeks is a sea change, something we've not witnessed since the gold markets were behaving normally. And I suspect it is the vanguard of much more gold-futures buying to come, which is super-bullish for the battered yellow metal. This year's extreme selling left speculators' longs and shorts at such great extremes that it will take colossal buying to unwind them.

The massive mean-reversion buying remaining for American gold-futures speculators is revealed in this chart, which was built from the CFTC's CoT data. It shows both the total long (green) and short (red) contracts held by both large and small speculators, with gold superimposed on top (blue). The long-side buying seen in recent weeks is truly just the tip of the iceberg as gold-futures positions return to normal.

While "normal" is a somewhat-subjective term, everyone would agree 2013 has proven an exceedingly atypical year for gold. Gold experienced its worst quarter in something like a century in Q2, plummeting 23%! A once-in-a-century event is obviously far from normal. Another once-in-a-century selling anomaly happened in 2008, that epic stock panic. Sandwiched between these extremes was some semblance of normalcy.