XAUUSD weekly outlook: how we plan a gold week before it starts

Most traders open their platform on Monday morning and start looking for a trade. We do the opposite — by the time the week opens, the work is already done and we are only waiting for price to reach a level we marked on Sunday.

Here is the exact routine we run every weekend on gold.

Step 1 — Start on the weekly, not the 15-minute

Open XAUUSD on the weekly chart and answer one question: is this market trending or ranging? Nothing else. No indicators, no drawing yet.

If the weekly is making higher highs and higher lows, we are only interested in buying pullbacks that week. If it is ranging, we trade both edges and skip the middle. This single decision removes about half of the bad trades a retail trader takes, because most losses come from buying in a downtrend and calling it "a dip".

Step 2 — Mark the levels that actually matter

Drop to the daily and 4-hour. Mark only these:

• The most recent unmitigated supply and demand zones
• Last week's high and low
• Any obvious equal highs or equal lows (resting liquidity)
• The psychological round numbers nearby — on gold, every 50 and 100 level

If your chart has more than about six lines on it, you have marked too much. A cluttered chart is a chart you will find a reason to trade on.

Step 3 — Write the plan down before Monday

This is the part almost nobody does. In your journal, write two or three if–then statements for the week:

If price sweeps last week's high and closes back below it on the 4H, I look for shorts targeting the 4H demand zone.

If price taps the daily demand at 4,010 and prints a bullish engulfing on the 1H, I look for longs toward the recent high.

Now you are not predicting anything. You are waiting for one of your own conditions to be met. Anything that is not on the list is not a trade — it is boredom.

Step 4 — Decide your risk before your entry

Fix the risk per trade at 1–2% of the account before you know the entry price. If you size after you find the setup, you will always size bigger on the trades you feel more confident about, and confidence is not correlated with outcome. That is how good weeks get erased by one trade.

Step 5 — Review on Friday, honestly

At the end of the week, go back to your plan and mark each line: taken and worked, taken and failed, or ignored. The most useful column over time is the trades you took that were never on the plan. That number tells you exactly how much of your P&L is skill and how much is impulse.

What this looks like in practice

We run this routine live with students every Sunday in the forex mentorship room, and the plan gets posted before the Asian session opens so nobody can claim hindsight. If you would rather just receive the setups as they trigger, that is what the daily forex signals plans are for — and you can see the results in our live track record.

Risk warning: Nothing in this post is financial advice or a recommendation to trade. Forex and CFDs carry a high level of risk and you can lose all of your capital. Past performance does not indicate future results.