Asian Range Breakout Strategy for Gold: Full Rules

The Asian range breakout on gold, in one sentence: mark a fixed Asia high and low, skip the day if that range is already too wide or if news will rip through it, and buy or sell only after a five-minute candle closes outside the range and price retests the broken level.

That sentence is the strategy. Everything below is the rule you would hand to another trader, or to yourself on a morning when London is moving and you want to improvise. It is not a backtest result. This page does not claim a win rate, a profit factor, or an average range. If you want those, you measure them. Bar replay is the place to do it without lying to yourself, and the standard for that honesty is in backtesting your gold edge.

The setup in one sentence

Trade in the direction of the first qualified break of the Asia range during London, at a retest, with the stop on the other side of the broken level and the size set by that stop.

If you cannot say it that short, you do not have a strategy yet. You have a collection of gold memories. The rest of this page exists so the sentence survives contact with a fast chart.

You need three things before the sentence can be traded:

• A clock for "Asia" that you will not edit.
• A definition of "too wide," written as a rule, not as a feeling at 08:05 London.
• A trigger that is a close, not a wick. Wicks through the Asia high are the fakeout. The close is the filter.

TradYX includes a 5-minute Asia range breakout alert among its setup alerts. An alert is a tap on the shoulder that the rules might be in play. It is not a filled order, and it does not replace the skip filters below. If the alert fires and your "too wide" rule says skip, you skip.

Range window and filters

Window. Example, and only an example: Asia is 00:00–06:00 UTC. That lines up with the Tokyo cash session and is easy to audit. Mark the highest high and the lowest low inside the window, including wicks. Those two prices are the range. Do not use a later candle to "clean up" the high because it looks like a spike. If you exclude spikes, write the exclusion before the week starts, such as "ignore a single wick that is the only print beyond the prior swing and that closes back inside." A rule you invent at 06:01 is a different strategy.

The New York label of 00:00 UTC changes with daylight saving. In US winter, 00:00 UTC is 19:00 the previous evening in New York. In US summer it is 20:00. The session map is the conversion table. Your platform server time is a third clock. Convert once, write it on the plan, and stop converting in your head.

Filters that skip the day. All of these are examples of rules. Adopt them, edit the thresholds from your own sample, and then freeze them.

• Skip if a high-impact release falls inside the Asia window or in the first hour of London. You are trading a range break, not a news spike. The driver list is in what moves gold.
• Skip if the Asia range is already wide relative to the target you intend to use. Example of a definition you must replace with your own number: skip when the Asia range is larger than the distance you would otherwise target, because the breakout then has to travel an unusually long way to pay 2R. Do not copy a pip figure from someone else's thumbnail. Measure twenty Asia ranges on your feed and set the cutoff from that list.
• Skip if the range is so tight that the spread is a large fraction of it. If the high and low are only a few spreads apart, a "break" is noise. Again, the cutoff is yours. The principle is that the range must be larger than the cost of getting in and out.
• Skip if the daily chart is inside a major level zone that sits on top of the Asia high you want to buy. A breakout into daily supply is a different trade. Name it as a skip, or require the daily zone to be cleared first.

Write the skips as checkboxes. A skipped day is a logged decision. If you only journal the breaks you took, the filter has no sample and you will conclude the strategy "doesn't work" when the real issue is that you took the days the filter was built to refuse.

Entry: M5 close and retest

The trigger has two parts. Both are required in this version of the rules.

Close. A five-minute candle must close outside the Asia range. A wick is not a close. The close should be beyond the high for a long, or beyond the low for a short, by more than the spread you are paying. If the close is outside by less than the spread, treat it as still inside. This is a judgment you make numeric: "outside by at least the spread plus one tick" is a rule. "It looks outside" is not.

Retest. After the close, price must come back to the broken level. The entry is the rejection of that retest, not the market order you slam because the close excited you. Example of a retest rule: the next five-minute candles trade back to the broken Asia high (for a long) and a five-minute candle closes back in the breakout direction. You enter on that close, or on a stop just beyond it. You do not enter in the middle of the pullback while it is still falling into the level.

If price never retests and runs, you miss the trade. Missing it is the cost of the rule. Chasing the extended candle turns the strategy into "buy whatever is moving at London," which you can also test, but do not call it this strategy.

Time stop, written in advance: no new signal after a clock you set, for example 90 minutes from the London open. A later break is a different sample. Optional direction filter: only take the break that agrees with the daily bias, and keep counter-trend breaks in a separate column if you take them at all.

Stop, targets, partials

The stop belongs where the idea is wrong, not where the dollar loss feels comfortable. For this strategy the idea is wrong if price is back inside the range and staying there, or if the retest fails through the level by more than a buffer.

Example stop, to adapt and then freeze:

• Long: stop a spread-width beyond the retest low, or beyond the Asia low if you want the wider, cleaner version. The wider stop is more honest and forces a smaller size.
• Short: the mirror image.

Then size from that distance. The formula and the worked account examples are in the gold position size calculator. If the honest stop implies a size your account cannot hold, you skip. You do not tighten the stop so the size looks brave.

Targets, as example rules rather than promises:

• First target at 1R, where you can close part of the position. Partials are optional. If you take them, define the fraction, such as half, and move the stop only according to a rule you wrote, such as "stop to entry after the market trades 1R, not before."
• Second target at the next higher-timeframe level, or at a fixed 2R, whichever you wrote. "The next level" requires the level to have been marked before the entry. Discovering a target after you are in is not a target. It is hope.

If neither target is at least as far as the stop before you enter, the trade does not meet a 1R minimum and you skip it. Gold will build another range tomorrow. The range does not owe you a trade today.

Do not trail the stop candle by candle unless that trail is the strategy. A discretionary trail turns every trade into a unique snowflake and makes the replay useless. Pick one management rule and keep it for the whole test.

Fakeout handling

A fakeout is a break that does not stick. In these rules it is specific: price closes back inside the Asia range after you have a signal, or the retest keeps going and closes back through the level.

What you do, written in advance:

• If you are not in, you do not enter. A close back inside cancels that direction for the session. One direction per day stops the "it broke both ways, so I traded both" spiral.
• If you are in and a five-minute candle closes back inside, you exit, unless you wrote in advance that you only exit at the stop or the target. Mixing the two is not a test.

A second, larger entry to win the first loss back is not a fakeout rule. It is revenge trading. Tag it "added after a loss." A break in the minute of a release is a spread event: the exit rule stays the same, and the review question is why the skip filter did not fire.

Alerts and a backtest checklist

You can watch the London open, or you can let an alert tell you the five-minute conditions are present and then apply the filters yourself. TradYX 5M alerts include an Asia range breakout alongside other gold setups. Use the alert as the start of the checklist, not the end.

Run the checklist in replay before live money. Twenty sessions is a pilot, not a verdict.

1. Mark the Asia window with the clock written on the chart. Screenshot it before London.
2. Record the range distance and whether the skip rules fired. Log skips. They are data.
3. Enter only on close plus retest. If you enter early "to practice," tag it as a rule break, not as a strategy trade.
4. Place the stop where the rule says. Size from the stop. Write R before you know the outcome.
5. Manage with the one rule you chose. Do not upgrade the target because the trade is working.
6. Tag the session, the spread at entry, and whether news was inside the buffer.
7. After twenty trades that followed the rules, and only those, look at average R. If you included the broken rules, you tested your impulses.

If the pilot is ugly, change one variable, rename the test, and run another. Changing the window, the target, and the news filter in the same week teaches nothing.

The rules are the product. The alert only keeps you from staring at Asia for six hours so you can miss the one close that mattered.