Gold at 4,435 breakout retest — holds for 4,395 or back to 4,359? | XAUUSD Aug 11

Hi everyone, Daniel here, an active prop trader. Gold is looking bullish today. Since last time, price played out exactly as planned, pulling back and then pushing on to make a fresh high.

First, price corrected down to the bottom of the sideways range, dropping about 453 pips. From there, a buy setup formed and price swung right back into the uptrend, and we've now confirmed a solid rally of roughly 1163 pips off that low. Right now we're forming a buy setup right at the key level we broke out from yesterday, and the real focus is whether this setup actually holds and follows through cleanly from here.

Today I focused on whether gold can resume its climb off this pullback and push higher again. So let's get right into it and take a close look starting with the daily chart. As for the gold daily chart, yesterday's candle closed bullish, confirming the move I'd been watching.

And that close lines up nicely with the daily scenario I laid out, so overall price is unfolding pretty much exactly the way I expected it to. First off, we had that recent bearish reversal candle, and price broke out above its high. So as I'd been saying all along, the bias basically favors more upside from here, and that's exactly how it's playing out.

And on the daily as well, yesterday's candle closed with both a higher high and a higher low, confirming that upward structure. So my bias stays firmly to the upside, and unless we get a clear reversal candle, I'll keep treating the daily chart as bullish and looking to buy those pullbacks. Now let's drop to the 1H chart, and yesterday's session for the community members came right around this red line here.

I sent the alert right around where this bearish doji formed. After that, I'll walk you through the key points I broke down for the community members and sum them up for you here. Let me walk you through the breakdown.

First, on the bias: right now we're sitting in a sideways range that formed midway through the ongoing uptrend, so that's the situation we're in. Right now, as of this stream, we're testing the upper edge of that range, so a short-term pullback is possible, but the bigger picture still leans bullish and that uptrend bias remains firmly intact. And this bullish doji candle was acting as the reference candle anchoring that sideways range we've been watching.

I was explaining that if price breaks out to the upside from here, we tend to see a strong bullish swing form, or an upward-trending trading range, and that kind of structure becomes easy to develop. On the other hand, you should always weigh the bearish scenario too, the move in the opposite direction. And the bearish case here is if price breaks out of this sideways range to the downside.

In this case, if you line up last Friday's high with that day's high, you can see they line up nicely and tend to form something like a double top. So my bearish scenario was that this double top confirms and price starts rolling over and heading lower from that resistance area. And I want to add that inside our community, I walk you through the whole process, all the price action that led me to this exact read on the market.

The setup I was watching was how each rising swing was building out within the bigger uptrend on the higher timeframe. Looking back, it was a strong, one-directional market where the bulls kept winning off these shallow pullbacks, and buyers stayed firmly in control the whole time. What stood out most as a sign of strength was the price action after each single bearish candle like this one, where the move higher swept in the stop-loss orders of the bears who had shorted there, and that kind of stop-run pattern showed up again and again.

Also, that big bullish candle that marked the high during the New York session was unusually large, so it looked like a classic climax candle, and since it formed a doji-like shape, this was exactly the kind of setup where you'd expect the market to slip into a sideways range. This whole sequence, where the breakout failed near this level and then reversed, is a textbook example of price moving inside a typical sideways range. In a sideways range, price tends to reverse at the upper limit, dip down to test the lower limit, then swing back up to retest the top again.

A failed breakout tends to reinforce the move in the opposite direction, so you can read it as price action that actually accelerates the reversal away from where the break was attempted. Because this kind of strongly momentum-driven uptrend had been in place, it naturally built the scenario that this sideways range would most likely resolve with an upside breakout rather than a downside one. So how did gold actually end up moving?

As I explained at the very start of yesterday's video, this sideways range was still in play, and price had just tapped the top of that range, so I said it was likely to pull back in a range-style correction first. From there, it would probably test the lower boundary next, but ultimately the setup pointed to an upside breakout and a return to the underlying uptrend. First, price dropped down to test the lower boundary of that sideways range, falling about 45 dollars, roughly 453 pips.

Then right at the low of this bullish doji candle I was watching as my reference candle, it formed a clean buy setup, and from that setup gold rallied about 116 dollars, roughly 1163 pips, back to the upside. This played out completely according to plan. So in today's Trading Lab members-only breakdown, I walk through both the bullish scenario and the bearish scenario across these three key points.

The first point covers how the sideways range failed to break down and instead flipped into an upside breakout, that whole sequence and the pullback that followed. The second point is how to read that reversal low as a valid long setup. And then the final point.

I walked through both the bullish and bearish scenarios in detail, laying out the case for a retest of the highs and the exact conditions that would flip the bias to the downside. Right now, after forming a buy setup that's testing the previous day's key level, price hasn't yet broken cleanly above the highs, but on the flip side we haven't seen any bearish development confirmed either. That wraps up today's gold analysis. Thanks for watching.