XAUUSD on TradingView, from chart to MT5 order.

Search XAUUSD in TradingView and you get the same instrument from a dozen data providers: OANDA:XAUUSD, FOREXCOM:XAUUSD, TVC:GOLD for spot, CAPITALCOM:GOLD and so on. Underneath, they all track one price: spot gold in US dollars per troy ounce. The differences are the feed (some update tick by tick, others on a short delay) and the small spread each provider builds in.

Two things matter for an automated trader. First, pick one chart and stay on it: your indicator logic and your alerts should live on a single symbol so every signal comes from the same data. Second, remember that the chart is analysis only — TradingView will never send an order anywhere by itself. Execution is a job for the alert and whatever receives it.

This is where gold automations die. Your TradingView chart says XAUUSD; your broker’s MetaTrader says something else. Some brokers list plain GOLD. Exness standard accounts carry XAUUSDm. Raw accounts append suffixes: XAUUSD.r, XAUUSD.pro, XAUUSD.raw. Same metal, same moves — different strings. An alert that carries XAUUSD into a terminal where the symbol is GOLD fails silently: the alert fires on your screen, no order opens, no error pops up anywhere.

The fix is boring and absolute: open Market Watch in MT5 (Ctrl+M) and copy the exact string. Put that string in your alert JSON. If your broker uses a common suffix, the SignalForge EA resolves it on its own (.m, .r, .pro, .raw and friends), and our server maps GOLD to XAUUSD out of the box; for anything stranger, support can set a per-account alias. The full failure walkthrough lives in wrong symbol, lot size or account in MT5, and the habit of pinning verified names belongs in your TradingView watchlist.

Gold trades nearly around the clock, five days a week: from Sunday evening UTC to Friday afternoon, with a short daily pause around the New York close. The friendly hours are the London session and the London/New York overlap, where liquidity is deepest and spreads are tightest. The hostile hours are the daily rollover (spreads widen for a few minutes) and, above all, macro news: an FOMC decision or a strong NFP print can move gold twenty dollars in a minute and blow the spread out with it.

Automation does not remove that risk; it makes you explicit about it. Either your strategy trades news on purpose, or your alerts carry an expiry so nothing stale fires into an empty market, or a news filter pauses execution around the release. We documented both sides: automating around FOMC releases and how the TradingView news filter works.

Once the chart, the symbol and the timing are settled, the automation itself is one alert. Attach it to your XAUUSD chart, give it your webhook URL, and let the JSON carry the order:

{
  "symbol": "XAUUSD",
  "action": "buy",
  "lot": 0.1,
  "sl": 30,
  "tp": 60
}

Three gold-specific notes. Sizing: a standard lot is 100 ounces, so 0.10 lots move $10 per $1 of price; size from your stop distance with the lot size calculator instead of copying a lot from a video. Fields: the body above is the same schema documented in TradingView webhook JSON examples; swap XAUUSD for {{ticker}} if one template should serve several charts. Proof: run it against a demo account first and read the Experts log — that is where a rejected gold order explains itself.

From there the path is the standard one described in the TradingView to MT5 bridge guide: the alert reaches the bridge, the bridge reaches the EA on your terminal, and the EA opens and manages the position with your SL, TP and trailing settings. If you run gold on a funded account, Prop Firm Shield enforces the daily loss limit across everything your gold strategy fires.