Jason Shapiro

Jason Shapiro is a veteran Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) whose macro and metals analysis has been read by institutional traders and resource investors for three decades. He is the founder of Crowded Market Report, a research service that uses Commitments of Traders (COT) positioning data to identify when commodities — most often gold, silver, copper, and oil — are set up for a reversal. For a mining investor trying to time entries against the herd, Shapiro's work is one of the more disciplined public frameworks available, because he trades the same signals he publishes.

Shapiro began trading futures out of Hong Kong and Europe in the early 1990s before returning to the United States to manage institutional capital. He previously founded Wall Street Horizon, a corporate-event and earnings-date research firm that became widely used on Wall Street, and later published the Options360 and ActiveInvestor newsletters. In 2020 he was profiled at length in Jack Schwager's Unknown Market Wizards, joining a short list of traders whose record warranted a full chapter in the successor to the original Market Wizards series.

His method is built on a single rule: find the most crowded position, wait, and fade it. Rather than forecasting macro narratives, Shapiro watches positioning — the COT report (a weekly Commitments of Traders disclosure that shows where hedgers and speculators are leaning in futures markets), futures open interest, and sentiment surveys — and waits for extremes. When commercial hedgers and speculators line up on the same side, he looks for the move in the opposite direction. The framework is mechanical and repeatable across gold, silver, copper, oil, and bonds, which is part of why it has survived three decades.

Today Shapiro publishes through the Crowded Market Report Substack and YouTube channel, and appears regularly on mining-focused programs including Jimmy Connor's Bloor Street Capital and the Resource Talks podcast, where he gives a futures trader's read on the metals complex. His recent work has argued that the U.S. bond market — not equities — is the larger risk to the gold and silver thesis, a stance resource investors can use as a cross-check against the bull-case narrative.