Gold bull flag at 4,510 — breakout or slide to 4,459? | XAUUSD Sep 4

Hi, this is Daniel, an active prop trader. Gold is bullish today. Just as our scenario called for, price broke out above the Tokyo session high, then we saw a pullback-style move.

If you measure this range from the recent high down to the pullback low, gold rallied a full 918 pips, exactly as planned. Today the big question is whether this uptrend keeps running, or whether this bull flag forming right now breaks to the downside and flips us bearish. That's the focus of today's analysis.

So let's dive right in and start with the daily chart as always. Yesterday's gold daily candle closed as a big bullish candle. We're seeing follow-through to the upside from this bullish reversal candle here, and for the daily chart, this is exactly the scenario I laid out for you last time.

So price was testing the lower edge of this sideways range here, which meant that short-term we'd found a bounce and I was leaning bullish. That said, there's a key point on how to actually trade this. Holding a position long, hoping for a series of higher highs, doesn't fit well because the downside momentum coming into here was really strong.

And as I said the day before, it's still better to trade this on day-trade timeframes or shorter rather than swinging it. As I mentioned at the start, yesterday's daily candle closed as a big bullish candle, so we're at a stage where you could read this as a daily-level bounce getting underway. If that prior bullish reversal candle and the previous day's strong bullish close are aiming to pull us back from the bigger uptrend into a fresh upward phase, then ideally today we'd see another bullish candle confirm with follow-through to the upside.

Even if we do pull back, one key level to watch is around 4,330, and that's a line the bulls really need to defend here. Here's why it matters. Personally, I'd go long above the high of this bullish reversal candle, and naturally I'd place my stop loss below the low.

Now those lower wicks were formed by buyers stepping in, so if price slips back under this 4,330 level, it starts triggering the bulls' long entries and their stop-loss orders one after another, which makes it much easier to keep falling. So that's the key point here: 4,330 really needs to hold. On the bearish side, the scenario would be a bearish candle closing that wipes out more than 50% of yesterday's big bullish candle.

If that plays out, I think price is more likely to slide into a sideways range, sitting inside this big bearish candle. Either way, a big bearish candle forming today that breaks below this recent low — that kind of move looks pretty unlikely right now, in my view. That wraps up the daily chart, so let's drop down to the 1H timeframe now and take a look.

Yesterday's members-only stream for the community was posted right at this red line here. The chart had been consolidating tightly up to here. Let me walk you through what I covered, focusing on a few key points here on YouTube, and I'll keep the breakdown moving from here.

First off, my bias here is to the upside. The high from yesterday's Tokyo session sits right around this area, and if price breaks out above it, I said I'd wait for a breakout pullback and then look to go long on that move. On the flip side, if price reverses and heads lower after that, I decided I'd treat it as a deeper pullback and wait for that to set up before buying.

The reason is that this zone lines up with several key levels at once — the prior day's low, the low made during the Tokyo session, and a major turning point in that big sideways range — so I said I'd wait for a dip down to around here and then look to buy the pullback. As for the bearish scenario, the basic idea was that the low made during the Tokyo session sat right around here, and only if price breaks below that level would I flip to a downside bias and start looking lower.

And on the recent high, I said that if price broke above it but the higher high was only marginally higher, I'd watch for a wedge forming and switch to a downside bias early, before it played out fully. I also walked through the full sequence of steps that led me to that call. Yesterday in the community I broke down this big bullish candle, and the key entry point was the high of that doji.

But before this big bullish candle formed, price gave us several fakeouts along the way — failed breakouts, basically. With all those fakeouts in play, I explained how the market was set up to easily trigger and sweep stop losses. And after the broadcast, gold played out exactly as scripted — it broke cleanly above the Tokyo session high, then gave us a textbook breakout-pullback move.

This is much clearer if you look at the five-minute chart. Right on script, we got a 91-dollar move — counting from this pullback low here, it rallied a full 91 dollars, that's 918 pips of upside confirmed. In today's community-only session, as always, I break down both the bullish and bearish scenarios, covering all three of those key points in detail.

The uptrend is still intact, but we're in a time-based correction right now. Watch whether this range breaks into a fresh leg up. We've got major economic data due today, and with the weekend also approaching, one key point I want to stress is that we should avoid taking aggressive trades here.

Looking at the real-time chart right now, we've formed another doji and price is stuck in a small sideways range. Momentum has been pushing strongly higher up to here, but with data releases on the horizon, this price action tells me most other traders aren't too keen on trading aggressively right now either. That wraps up today's gold update.