Gold is not just another pair
An RSI strategy on gold is an RSI strategy — what the oscillator does is covered in the RSI playbook. What is specific to gold is the instrument, and that is what breaks strategies moved onto it from FX.
Three things to settle before you build
The symbol is not one thing. Gold appears under different tickers on different data feeds, and a strategy backtested on one may behave differently on another because the underlying price series is not identical — different sessions, different quoting, sometimes a different instrument entirely (spot versus a future versus a CFD). Fix the exact symbol you will trade, and record it beside your results.
The tick size is not an FX tick size. This is the setting that silently
changes meaning. slippage in Pine is counted in ticks, so a
slippage = 3 you calibrated on EURUSD is not three of the same thing here.
Moving an FX strategy to gold without re-deriving slippage understates or
overstates costs, usually badly.
It gaps. Gold has session breaks, and price crosses levels during them. The broker emulator assumes intrabar data does not exist inside a gap, so a stop sitting inside one is not filled at your stop price — it is dealt with when trading resumes, and the difference is the gap. Any strategy holding a position through a break should expect its real losses on those trades to be worse than the backtest's. The mechanism is in risk management.
Which is why the stop should be in ATR
An ATR-based stop adjusts itself to the instrument, so it survives being moved in a way a fixed-pip stop does not:
| Stop type | Moving a strategy from EURUSD to XAUUSD |
|---|---|
| fixed pips | means a completely different distance — needs re-tuning |
| ATR multiple | scales automatically to gold's larger typical range |
That does not make the strategy portable — nothing does, on its own — but it removes one of the two settings that break first. The construction, and why a ratio rather than a level is the portable form, is in the ATR regime filter.
Building it
| Field | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Symbol | the exact gold ticker you will trade | record it with your results |
| Timeframe | 1 hour or higher | gold's intraday noise is large |
| RSI | 14, oversold 30 | re-derive the levels on this symbol |
| Trend filter | price above a 200-period MA | take longs with the trend only |
| Stop / target | 2 × ATR / 3 × ATR | not fixed pips |
| Slippage | re-derived in gold's ticks | not carried over from FX |
| Session filter | yes | spreads widen outside liquid hours |
The verification that matters most here
Run the strategy, open the List of Trades, and check three fills against the chart: does each fill price fall inside that bar's high–low range? Then check whether any exits sit next to a session gap.
Those two checks catch the gold-specific failures directly, and they take about a minute — part of the trade-list audit in reading the Strategy Tester.
Tactix AI — Studio vs Guide
Tactix AI is AlfaTactix’s product assistant brand (open Tactix AI).
- Tactix Studio turns a one-sentence strategy description into a draft across Timeframe, Signals, Filters, and Risk in the visual Strategy Builder. You review and edit every field before Code Generator writes MQL5 or Pine Script.
- Tactix Guide explains the step you are on — what to fill, what a control means, or how to phrase a rule — without dumping untested source code.
That is form-first automation: the LLM never replaces Code Generator, and you keep plan limits and real-time validation.