XAUUSD is the ticker for spot gold against the US dollar. Before a signal on it is useful you need to know what one lot is, what a pip is worth, and why the spread you see at 08:00 is not the spread you get at 13:30.
XAUUSD is spot gold quoted in US dollars per troy ounce. XAU is the ISO code for gold; the X prefix marks a non-national currency. One standard lot is 100 ounces, quoted to two decimals, with a pip conventionally taken as 0.1, making one pip roughly $10 per standard lot. A signal on XAUUSD is read exactly like a forex signal; only the scale of the numbers changes.
Currency codes follow ISO 4217. National currencies get a two-letter country code plus a letter for the currency: US Dollar is USD, Euro is EUR. Commodities traded as currencies get an X prefix. XAU for gold, XAG silver, XPT platinum, XPD palladium.
So XAUUSD reads as "gold against the US dollar", quoted as the number of dollars for one troy ounce. A quote of 2350.45 means one ounce costs $2,350.45. A troy ounce is 31.1035 grams, slightly heavier than the ordinary ounce.
Buying XAUUSD is a long gold, short dollar position. Both legs matter: gold can be flat in euro terms while XAUUSD rises purely because the dollar fell. That is a common source of confusion when a "gold rally" does not match the fundamental story you expected.
| Property | Typical value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Standard lot | 100 troy ounces | Some brokers use 10 ounces; verify |
| Minimum lot | 0.01 (1 ounce) | Broker-dependent |
| Quote precision | 2 decimals | Some feeds show 3 |
| Pip (convention) | 0.1 | Some platforms call 0.01 a pip |
| Pip value per lot | ≈ $10 | Follows directly from 100 oz × 0.1 |
| Typical spread | 15–35 points | Variable; multiplies on news |
| Trading hours | ~23h/day, Mon–Fri | Daily break around rollover |
The pip ambiguity is the one that bites. If your platform treats 0.01 as a pip, a "150-pip stop" in a signal means something four-and-a-half times different from what the author intended. When in doubt, work in price distance. "stop at 2331.00" is unambiguous in a way that "150 pips" is not.
Gold spread is variable and the variation is large. A broker advertising "from 15 points" is quoting the best case in the deepest part of the London–New York overlap. Around a US CPI release the same instrument can widen to 80 points or more for a few minutes, and around the daily rollover it widens on almost every broker.
Two practical consequences. First, a stop placed just beyond an obvious level can be taken out by a spread spike rather than by price, leave room for it. Second, entering in the first seconds after a major release means paying several times the normal cost, which is enough to turn a marginal setup into a negative-expectancy one.
Session-wise, the Asian hours are typically quiet and mean-reverting, London builds the range, and the New York overlap produces most of the day's movement. See trading sessions for the full picture.
Take the example signal: Buy XAU/USD, entry 2338.40, stop 2331.00, TP1 2345.90, TP2 2352.10.
Scaling out at TP1 and moving the stop to breakeven converts the remainder into a free option on TP2. That is a personal choice about how you weight consistency against expectancy, and the signal-reading guide covers the trade-off.
Entry, stop and three targets on every gold signal, with the chart and a sizing calculator on the same screen.
Not investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results.