Live Gold Chart

A gold chart plots price against time — usually the XAU/USD spot in dollars per troy ounce. Each point is a price at a moment; a line chart joins the closing prices, while a candlestick chart shows the open, high, low and close of each period. For most readers the line chart is enough: its shape tells you the trend at a glance. The first thing to check is the timeframe — the same market can look like a crash on a 1-day chart and a blip on a 1-year chart — so always read at least two timeframes before forming a view.

Trend, support and resistance

A trend is simply the market’s direction over your chosen window: higher highs and higher lows mark an uptrend, lower highs and lower lows a downtrend, and a flat band a range. Support and resistance are the levels where the price has repeatedly turned — support below, where buyers step in, and resistance above, where sellers do. Round numbers act as magnets: gold paused and fought around $2,000, $3,000 and $4,000 on its way up, because thousands of traders place orders at exactly those levels. A clean break through resistance often turns that level into new support — but not always, and false breakouts are common.

What the chart cannot tell you

The chart is a record, not a forecast. It cannot tell you what a central bank will do next week, whether a war will start, or when a trend will end — and the patterns traders name (head and shoulders, double tops, golden crosses) work just often enough to stay popular and fail just often enough to punish anyone who bets the house on them. Use the chart for what it is good at: seeing whether gold is rising or falling, how volatile it has been lately, and whether today’s price is high or low compared with the recent past. For the numbers behind the picture, see the gold price history and the gold spot price pages.