Trading Academy
Free lessons, from your first trade to managing risk like a pro.
Gold Trading (XAU/USD) — Why It Is Different
More retail accounts are damaged on gold than on any currency pair, and the reason is rarely bad analysis. It is that traders apply currency habits to an instrument that moves three to five times as far, and discover the mismatch through a stop that was never wide enough. This section covers XAU/USD specifically. Not […]
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How the Gold Market Works — Spot, Futures and ETFs
The gold price on your platform is not set by your broker, and it is not set in one place. It emerges from several overlapping markets — London physical trading, New York futures, and ETF flows — each with different participants and different hours. Knowing which one is driving at a given time explains a […]
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Gold Contract Specs — Pip Value, Lot Size and Margin
This is the least interesting lesson in the section and the one most likely to save your account. Gold specifications vary between brokers in ways currency pairs do not, and a trader who assumes rather than checks can be risking ten times what they calculated without any warning from the platform. The standard contract One […]
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Best Time to Trade Gold — Sessions and Volatility Windows
Gold behaves like a different instrument depending on the hour. The same technical setup that works during the London–New York overlap fails repeatedly during Asian hours, not because the analysis changed but because the participants did. Choosing when to trade gold matters roughly as much as choosing what to trade. The three sessions Gold trades […]
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Gold Volatility and Position Sizing — Using ATR on XAU/USD
Most gold losses are volatility losses wearing an analysis costume. The direction was reasonable, the level was reasonable, and the stop was sized for a market that does not exist. Gold demands that you measure how far it is currently moving and let that measurement determine both your stop and your position size. Why fixed […]
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Gold Technical Levels — Round Numbers and False Breaks
Gold respects technical levels, but not in the way currency pairs do. It overshoots them, returns to them, and produces more false breaks than a major pair would. Understanding how gold treats structure — and why round numbers carry unusual weight here — prevents a good deal of avoidable frustration. Levels work, with wider tolerance […]
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Gold and the Dollar — How the Relationship Really Works
"Gold goes down when the dollar goes up" is the first thing most traders learn about XAU/USD and the first thing that costs them money. The relationship is real, frequently inverse, and reliable enough to be dangerous — because the periods when it breaks are precisely the periods when the largest moves occur. Why the […]
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News and Gold — Which Releases Move XAU/USD
Gold reacts to news more violently than most currency pairs and recovers from those reactions less predictably. A trader who holds a gold position through a Fed decision without adjusting size is not taking a calculated risk — they are taking an unmeasured one, because the stop they placed may not fill anywhere near where […]
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Common Gold Trading Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Gold accounts are rarely lost through one catastrophic decision. They are lost through a handful of specific errors repeated until the balance is gone, and the same errors appear in almost every account I have looked at over twelve years. None of them are subtle, and every one is preventable in advance. 1. Using currency-pair […]
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Building a Gold Trading Approach — Rules That Work
This lesson assembles the section into something usable: a set of rules you could write on one page and follow tomorrow. It is deliberately conservative, because gold punishes ambition faster than any other instrument a retail trader is likely to touch. Before you trade gold at all Three conditions worth meeting honestly. You have consistent […]
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