Gold at 4,397 resistance — break higher or slide to 4,333? | XAUUSD Sep 18

Hi everyone, Daniel here, active prop trader. Gold is biased to the upside today. That bearish reversal candle we were tracking finally broke out to the upside, so right on script, we now had to flip our bias bullish.

Today's Tokyo session played out cleanly, we got a pullback right into that bearish reversal candle that broke out the prior day, then a fresh upswing formed and price rallied about 653 pips, exactly on script. The strong uptrend structure is still fully intact and hasn't broken down at all. The breakout direction off that recent doji was set to decide where we go, and right now price has sold off exactly the projected range from that doji and is bouncing back off it.

So the key question is whether price now swings back into the uptrend, or whether we get another downside swing that carries into a much deeper pullback. That's exactly what I focused on for you today. Alright, let's dive right in and start with a close look at the daily chart.

Since the last stream, the daily chart has printed a solid bullish candle here. As of yesterday, the daily-chart scenario I laid out was this: this bearish doji is an outside bar that fully engulfs the previous two daily candles, so until we actually break out of that outside bar in one direction, the daily timeframe stays undecided and it's hard to call a clear bias either way. And for that day's movement, I explained that the four price points of this doji tend to act as key levels, so we'd likely form a short-term trading range around them.

As for the breakout direction, if you evaluate this doji on its own, the upper wick is extremely long and the highs are being pushed up, so I explained that a breakout is more likely to run to the upside from here. That was the daily-chart scenario I laid out. For now, yesterday's daily candle closed as a bullish candle, but the body actually pulled back inside this doji again by the close.

So looking at yesterday's candle together with the doji right before it, we simply can't determine a clear direction from those two candles alone yet. Right now, today's daily candle is showing an attempt to break above the recent high. If it does push higher, and specifically if it clears the high of the prior candle while leaving a solid body above it, then these two candles start working together as a genuine buy setup.

In that case, we'd be looking at a test of the key level against this whole channel-like downswing we've had. And if that plays out, there's a strong chance price tries to run all the way up toward here, roughly just short of the 4500 dollar level. On the flip side, if today's daily candle instead closes as a bearish candle that leaves a real body behind, then we're right back inside this doji zone again.

In that scenario, I wouldn't expect price to just drop away cleanly and comfortably. Instead, the more likely path is that we come back here and carve out another sideways range, chopping around this same area rather than trending in either direction. That wraps up the daily chart, so now let's shift over to the 1H timeframe.

On the 1H, this red line marks where the chart sat when we ran yesterday's community-only session for our members. Let me walk you through the key points I covered there, picking out a few of the highlights for YouTube. First off, let's look at this point right here.

As of yesterday, my read was that the level that capped price three times at the highs is very likely acting as an order block. And at the time of the broadcast, gold had formed a bearish reversal candle, which we could interpret as a pullback right back into that same order block zone. So my view was that as long as this setup isn't invalidated, we stay bearish.

But on the flip side, if price breaks out above this level to the upside, then I'd switch to a bullish bias and start hunting for long entries. That's the plan I walked you through. So that was the read I was working with.

And going even further back, I've broken down all the price action since the video before last in detail inside the community. So the real focus, the thing that mattered most here, was this range right here — that's where everything was playing out. After that bearish reversal candle, price clearly stalled into a sideways range where the candlesticks were all overlapping each other.

This bullish candle gives us the breakout, and right here we get the breakout pullback. But looking at the whole structure, almost every candle overlapped, so there really wasn't any strong directional bias showing at all. Also, with this structure where each range steps progressively higher, we're most likely looking at a trending trading range forming here, which meant that afterward price was very likely to at least revisit that first range low.

After that kind of price action printed a doji, the FOMC announcement hit and we broke sharply lower with a big bearish candle. Since that move was so abrupt, the odds of price retracing much of it climbed significantly. On top of that, the down swing lacked follow-through, and right after that big bearish candle printed, we formed an oversized bullish candle that turned into a doji here.

Inside that doji, every candle overlapped one another, so no particularly strong or high-probability signal was really showing up there. Once price broke out to the upside, that breakout candle looked half-baked, and it got capped again right at the same order block. It printed a candle that looked exactly like a sell setup, so naturally you'd short below this low, but that position never actually got filled.

It printed a big bullish candle that even negated that move, and with these double fakeouts price tends to run hard that way, so a clean pullback followed and the whole thing built into an upside swing. And at broadcast time we had that bearish reversal candle, which gave us a clean pivot to build the whole trade around and structure our entries. So here's how gold ultimately played out.

That single high we picked as the axis for the whole directional call turned out to be exactly the level that mattered. The high of that bearish reversal candle — price broke clean above it too, right into the New York session open. The London session was a clear trend day, and after that the New York session settled into a sideways, range-bound consolidation.

Now in today's Tokyo session, we got a very clean setup: price pulled back to test yesterday's bearish reversal candle, and once that completed, a buy setup formed. Toward the recent high we've got a $65 range, and just as the scenario called for, price has now rallied roughly 653 pips. For today's community members, the analysis covers these three key points, breaking down both the bullish and the bearish scenario in detail.

First point: the 1H chart is in an uptrend, so the bias stays bullish for now. Second point: the direction we break the recent doji decides the next move here. Third point: if the uptrend breaks, we flip our bias and switch to the downside.

I walked you through it with concrete criteria and clear price action. Since that community-only stream, price has kept moving. Recently, price finished dropping to the measured move of this range.

Now price is bouncing off the 4370 level, which we flagged inside the community as a key pivot. Will this bounce keep going and pull price back into the uptrend once again? Or does the down-swing extend further, forcing us to flip our bias to the downside? That's the level to watch as gold's price action unfolds. That wraps up today's gold analysis.