ICT Gold strategy XAUUSD day trading

Shared by a BacktestingMax trader on 25 Jun 2026

ICT Gold strategy — XAUUSD day trading
Morning routine (10 mins before London open): Open your H4/Daily chart and mark where the Draw on Liquidity is the nearest old high or low that price is likely being pulled toward. Then drop to H1 and mark your order blocks and any obvious liquidity clusters (equal highs, equal lows, previous day's high/low). During the killzone: Don't enter immediately. Watch for the sweep first price spikes through a level to grab stops, then aggressively reverses. That reversal and the FVG/OB it leaves behind is your setup. For the $5K challenge specifically: You only need 1–2 clean ICT setups per week at 1:2 RR to hit Phase 1 comfortably. Patience is the edge most traders fail prop challenges by overtrading, not by having a bad strategy.

Use the checklist above before every single entry. If you can't tick all 9 boxes, skip the trade.

Entry rules

  1. Step 1 — Top-down analysis (do this every morning)
  2. H4 / Daily Establish bias Is price above or below previous day high/low? Mark Draw on Liquidity (DOL) — where is price being pulled to?
  3. H1 Mark order blocks Find the last bearish candle before a bullish impulse (buy OB) or last bullish candle before a drop (sell OB).
  4. H1 / M15 Map liquidity Mark equal highs & lows, previous day/week highs & lows. These are where stops are resting — price hunts them.
  5. M15 / M5 Spot FVGs 3-candle imbalance: gap between candle 1 high and candle 3 low. Price returns to fill these — your entry zone.
  6. Step 2 — ICT entry model (the sequence)
  7. ① Liquidity sweep ② Displacement ③ Retracement to OB/FVG ④ Entry + target
  8. Wait for price to sweep liquidity (take out equal highs/lows or previous day high/low), then look for a strong displacement candle in the opposite direction. Price will retrace into the order block or FVG left behind — that's your entry.
  9. Step 3 — Trade only in killzones (EAT time)
  10. London open 10:00 – 12:00 Medium
  11. NY open 3:00 – 6:00 PM Best ⚡
  12. NY close 9:00 – 11:00 PM Avoid
  13. ICT concepts work best during killzones when institutions are actively moving price. Avoid late sessions — choppy and unpredictable on Gold.

Invalidation

  1. Common ICT mistakes on Gold — avoid these

Stop loss and take profit

  1. Stop: 2–5 pips below OB
  2. Target: next liquidity pool
  3. Min RR: 1:2

Author's checklist

  1. ✓ Bias confirmed on H4/Daily
  2. ✓ Liquidity pool identified (where are the stops?)
  3. ✓ Price swept liquidity (stop hunt visible on chart)
  4. ✓ Displacement candle seen (strong move away from sweep)
  5. ✓ OB or FVG identified as entry zone
  6. ✓ I'm inside a killzone (London or NY open)
  7. ✓ No major news in next 30 mins
  8. ✓ Risk = $50 max (lot size calculated)
  9. ✓ Daily loss not above -$150 already

Inside the app

Opening this strategy in BacktestingMax shows the full record behind the numbers above, on a free account: every trade with entry, exit, size and P&L plus CSV and Excel export; a bar-by-bar replay of the author's own session on 1-minute history; Monte Carlo projections that reshuffle the trade sequence; the equity curve against buy-and-hold; advanced statistics including Sharpe and Sortino ratios, expectancy, payoff ratio, recovery factor, maximum drawdown and longest time underwater; a day-by-day P&L calendar; and behavioural analysis covering revenge trading, position-size chasing, long/short bias and the hours and days it actually made money.

Open this strategy in BacktestingMax (free account required)

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Figures come from backtests run by the author inside BacktestingMax. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and nothing here is financial advice.