XAUUSD is the price of one troy ounce of gold quoted in US dollars. XAU is the metal's ticker and USD is the dollar, so the symbol tells you how many dollars one ounce of gold is worth. On MT5 it trades like any other symbol with bid, ask and spread.

What moves the gold price?

Gold is driven mainly by US dollar strength, real interest rates and bond yields, risk sentiment and safe-haven demand, inflation expectations, and central bank buying. A stronger dollar and higher real yields tend to pressure gold, while fear, falling yields and inflation worries tend to support it.

What are the best hours to trade gold?

Gold is most active during the London session and the US session overlap, roughly 08:00 to 17:00 London time. This is when liquidity is deepest and spreads are tightest. Major moves often happen around US economic releases such as CPI, jobs data and Federal Reserve decisions.

What is the best indicator for trading gold?

There is no single magic indicator. Because gold trends hard and reverses sharply, a structure-based reading that confirms whether the market is genuinely trending or chopping is more useful than a lone oscillator. Market Structure Pro fuses 27 tools into one TRADE, TRANSITION or NO TRADE verdict for XAUUSD.

Home / Learn Hub / Timeframes / Weekly & Monthly

Intermediate

Weekly and Monthly Charts: Context, Levels and Long Holds

You do not have to trade the weekly chart to need it. It holds the levels that decide what your intraday chart does, and five minutes with it on a Sunday will explain more than a week of watching M5.

In one sentence:

Weekly and monthly charts compress each week or month into a single candle, which makes them almost useless for timing entries and the best tool available for knowing where price actually is.

Weekly and Monthly Charts at a glance

Difficulty	Intermediate. Simple to read, demanding to trade, and useful to everyone.
Candle length	One trading week (W1) or one calendar month (MN).
Typical hold time	Weeks to many months when traded directly.
Trades per year	A handful per instrument. Position trading is deliberately low-frequency.
Screen time needed	Fifteen minutes at the weekend is enough, even if you trade intraday.
Main use for most traders	Context and level-marking, not entries.
What it needs	Small positions, a tolerance for wide stops, and awareness of swap or financing costs.
What kills it	Financing charges on very long leveraged holds, and stops sized without regard to that horizon.

What it is and why it works

A weekly candle compresses five trading days into one bar. A monthly candle compresses roughly twenty-two. At that resolution you cannot see when to enter anything, but you can see, at a glance, where price sits within the range it has occupied for years, which direction the larger move has been going, and which prices have repeatedly mattered.

That last point is the reason these charts are useful to every trader, including people who never hold anything overnight. Levels do not belong to timeframes. A price that turned the market three times over four years is the same price on the 5-minute chart, and when an intraday move stalls for no visible reason, the explanation is very often a weekly or monthly level that was not on the chart. Ten minutes spent marking those prices does more for an intraday trader’s results than most indicator work.

Traded directly, the weekly chart is the home of position trading: a handful of entries a year, stops measured in hundreds or thousands of pips, targets measured in months. The costs of entering are negligible, you pay the spread perhaps five times a year, but a different cost takes over. Leveraged positions accrue swap or financing every night, and over a six-month hold that daily charge compounds into a figure that can decide whether the trade was worth taking at all. On a very long hold, financing is the main transaction cost, not the spread.

The monthly chart is more specialised again. It is too coarse for almost any trading decision, but it is unmatched for answering one question: is this instrument near the top, the bottom or the middle of its long-term range? Traders who feel a market is expensive or cheap are usually reasoning from a picture they have never actually looked at, and the monthly chart supplies it in seconds.

How to trade it, step by step

Open the weekly chart at the weekend, before anything else. Make it the first thing you look at each week regardless of the timeframe you trade. Ask two questions: which direction have the last several weekly candles been going, and where is price sitting relative to the obvious weekly highs and lows?
Mark every price where the weekly chart has clearly turned. Look back two to five years. Draw a horizontal line at each obvious swing high and low, and at any price that has acted as both support and resistance at different times: those matter most. You should end up with perhaps six to ten lines per instrument, not thirty.
Carry those lines down to your trading chart and leave them there. They stay on the M15, H1 or H4 chart permanently. When an intraday move stalls at one of them, you have an explanation and a decision point rather than a surprise. This step alone is why intraday traders should look at weekly charts.
Check the monthly chart once a month for position. One question only: is price near the top, the bottom, or somewhere in the middle of its multi-year range? Buying into the top of a decade-long range and selling into the bottom of one are both harder trades than they look on a daily chart, and only the monthly view shows you which you are doing.
If you intend to trade the weekly chart directly, define entries on the closed weekly candle. The workable setups are a rejection of a weekly level, a candle that pushes through and closes back inside, and a break with acceptance, where a weekly candle closes decisively beyond a level that has held for a long time. You will get a handful of these a year per instrument.
Place the stop beyond the weekly structure, and expect it to be very wide. Several hundred pips on a major forex pair, more on gold or an index. The number is only correct if it sits where the multi-month thesis is genuinely disproved. Anything tighter will be removed by a single ordinary week.
Size the position from that stop and check the result is expressible. Fix your risk in money, then use the position size calculator. On an eight-hundred-pip stop the position will be tiny, and on a small account it may fall below your broker’s minimum increment. If it does, the honest answer is that this instrument is not available to you on this timeframe, not that you should widen the risk.
Calculate the financing cost before you enter. Look up the daily swap rate for the instrument and direction, multiply by your intended holding period in days, and compare it to your target. On a six-month hold this can be a substantial fraction of the expected gain, and on the wrong side of a rate differential it can remove it entirely.
Review positions weekly, at the close, and nothing more often. A position-trading thesis is not affected by what happens on a Tuesday afternoon. Set the orders, do the weekly review, and let the trade have the months it needs.

Size every one of those entries with the position size calculator and check the trade is worth taking with the risk/reward calculator before you commit.

The conditions it needs

Level-marking for every timeframe

This is the universal use and it costs nothing. Weekly and monthly levels are where large, slow participants have repeatedly transacted, which is why they keep producing reactions years later. Any trader on any timeframe benefits from having them drawn, and most intraday traders who complain that price “stalled for no reason” are looking at a chart missing those lines.

A macro driver with a long horizon

Weekly trades need something slow behind them: a sustained shift in interest-rate expectations, a commodity supply cycle, a persistent equity regime. These are the forces that move price for months. Without one, a weekly position is simply a very large bet on chart shape.

An account that can hold tiny positions

The binding constraint at this horizon is granularity. If a correct position size on your account is below your broker’s minimum lot, the trade is not available. Micro lots or fractional sizing solve this; increasing the risk percentage to make the numbers work does not.

Financing costs that do not eat the thesis

Long holds pay swap every night. On the favourable side of an interest-rate differential this can be a small credit; on the wrong side it is a steady drain that grows for as long as you are right about direction but slow. Check it before entering, not after.

When it fails

Financing costs consuming the trade. This is the specific way long holds fail. The spread you paid once is irrelevant, but a daily swap charge across five months is not. Traders check the entry cost and never check the carrying cost, then wonder why a correct directional call produced a modest result.
Using weekly charts to time entries. A weekly candle takes five days to close. Acting on Wednesday because the candle “looks like” a rejection means acting on a shape that has two days left to change completely. If you want precise entries with a weekly thesis, take them on H4 or D1.
Stops that are wide in pips but not in logic. Traders sometimes pick a very large round number for a weekly stop because it feels sufficient. If it does not sit beyond the structure that would disprove the trade, it is simply an expensive arbitrary exit. Wide and structural are not the same thing.
Positions too large for the horizon. A weekly trade will spend weeks underwater at some point even when it is ultimately right. Any position large enough to make that uncomfortable will be closed in the middle, which is the worst possible outcome: full cost, no benefit, and the thesis abandoned exactly where it was being tested.
Ignoring event risk across a long hold. Over several months a position will cross elections, central bank cycles, earnings seasons and geopolitical shocks. Gaps can open beyond the stop and the realised loss can exceed the plan. Long-horizon trades should be sized on the assumption that at least one of these will land badly.
Confusing a long-term view with a trade. Believing an instrument is cheap on the monthly chart is not a setup. Without a defined entry, a stop that disproves the idea and a position size, it is an opinion, and opinions held with leverage are how long-term traders discover the difference.

Markets that suit this timeframe

Gold (XAU/USD): Multi-year macro cycles that only make sense on weekly and monthly charts.
EUR/USD: Long rate-differential trends that persist for months at a time.
SPX500 (S&P 500): Decades of trend structure and clean monthly-chart context.
USD/JPY: Driven by rate differentials, with swap costs that materially affect long holds in both directions.
WTI Crude Oil: Supply cycles that play out over months, though contract roll and financing need care.

For different levels of experience

If you are brand new

You do not need to trade the weekly chart to benefit from it, and as a beginner you probably should not be trading it directly. What you should do is look at it once a week.

Every Sunday, open the weekly chart of whatever you trade. Zoom out so you can see two or three years. Draw a horizontal line at each price where the market obviously turned around: the highs and lows that stand out. Now switch back to whichever chart you actually trade and leave those lines on it. That is the whole exercise, and it takes about ten minutes.

What you will notice within a few weeks is that your instrument keeps stopping at those lines. Moves that seemed to end randomly turn out to have ended somewhere. That is context, and it is the difference between trading a chart and trading a screen. If you later want to hold trades for months, come back to it, but learn the rhythm on the 4-hour or daily chart first.

If your results are inconsistent

The most common gap for intermediate traders is that they have a daily-chart bias and no weekly one, so they take daily trend trades into weekly resistance without realising it. Those trades are not wrong exactly, but they are working against a slower and larger flow, and the target usually needs to be much closer than the daily chart suggests.

Fix it with a simple habit: before you accept any daily or H4 setup, look at where the nearest weekly level sits relative to your target. If your target is beyond a significant weekly level, either shorten the target or accept that the level is the realistic destination.

If you are starting to hold trades for weeks, learn the financing arithmetic now rather than later. Look up the swap rate on your platform for the instrument and direction, multiply by thirty, and see what a month of holding costs. For many people that number is a genuine surprise, and it changes which long trades are worth taking.

If you are experienced

Weekly and monthly charts are where the level set that governs everything below is actually defined. Practically, treat them as the source of the reference prices in a hierarchical model (MN for regime position, W1 for the active level set, D1 and below for expression) rather than as signal generators in their own right. The signal-to-noise ratio is excellent and the sample size is hopeless, which is precisely the wrong combination for statistical validation.

At this horizon carry becomes a first-order term. On a multi-month FX position the accumulated swap can rival the expected move, and its sign depends on the rate differential, so the same directional view can be materially positive or negative in net terms depending on which side you are on. Any long-horizon expectancy model that ignores financing is incomplete.

Two data caveats. Weekly candle boundaries depend on the broker’s week definition, and some feeds produce a stub Sunday candle that distorts weekly wicks and any rule keyed to them. On leveraged commodity and index products, the underlying roll or adjustment convention means the long-dated chart you are analysing is not a continuous tradeable series: know how your provider constructs it before drawing multi-year levels on it.

Risk management for this strategy

Two risks dominate at this horizon, and neither is the one people expect. The first is financing. A leveraged position held for months accrues swap or interest every night, and that cost is invisible on the chart. Before entering any trade you intend to hold for weeks, look up the daily rate, multiply by the expected holding period and treat the result as part of the trade’s cost. On the unfavourable side of a rate differential it can be a substantial fraction of the target.

The second is event exposure. Over several months a position will cross central bank cycles, elections and unforeseen shocks. Any of these can gap price beyond the stop, meaning the realised loss exceeds the planned one. The response is to size below your normal maximum on very long holds, so that a gap through the stop is survivable rather than defining.

On stop width, the usual principle applies but more forcefully: an eight-hundred-pip stop simply produces a very small position for the same fixed risk. The practical limit is whether your broker’s minimum increment allows that position at all. If the correct size is below the minimum, the trade is unavailable on your account, and the wrong answer is to trade the minimum anyway and accept several times your intended risk. Use the position size calculator to check before you commit.

Where Market Structure Pro fits

The weekly chart poses a question that is easy to ask and hard to answer with confidence: is this multi-month structure still intact, or is it in the process of changing? Because there are so few candles, the transition is drawn out over weeks and there is very little data to judge it from, and the cost of being wrong is a position held for months in the wrong direction.

Market Structure Pro reads the same twenty-seven inputs on whatever timeframe you apply it to and returns a single verdict: TRADE, TRANSITION or NO TRADE, with a confidence percentage, an A/B/C grade and a plain-English explanation of what supports and limits it. The TRANSITION state is the most relevant of the three on weekly charts, because that is exactly what a multi-month regime change looks like while it is happening, and the plain-English reasoning gives you something concrete to re-read next weekend rather than a remembered impression.

It is also useful the other way round. Applied to the weekly chart, it gives an intraday trader a stated higher-timeframe context to check their trades against, which is the discipline that prevents taking intraday longs into weekly resistance. It is non-repainting, so the weekly verdict locks when the weekly bar closes. MSP does not place trades, is not a signal service and guarantees nothing.

TRADETRANSITIONNO TRADE

One verdict with a confidence score, an A/B/C grade and a plain-English reason. Non-repainting, on every MT5 instrument and timeframe.

Stop guessing whether the setup is valid

Market Structure Pro reads structure, trend, momentum, levels, volatility, volume and session in one pass and gives you a single answer with the reasoning attached. Free 7-day trial, no card required.

Start free trial

Frequently asked questions

Should I look at the weekly chart if I trade intraday?

Yes, and it takes about ten minutes a week. Weekly and monthly charts hold the levels where large, slow participants have repeatedly transacted, and those prices keep producing reactions on every timeframe. Intraday moves that stall for no visible reason are frequently stalling at a weekly level.

Can you trade the weekly chart?

You can, and it is the basis of position trading, but it means a handful of trades a year per instrument, stops measured in hundreds of pips and holds lasting months. The entry costs are negligible; the dominant cost becomes the daily swap or financing charge on a leveraged position.

How do I mark levels from the weekly chart?

Zoom out two to five years and draw a horizontal line at each obvious swing high and low, paying particular attention to prices that have acted as both support and resistance at different times. Six to ten lines per instrument is plenty, and they should be left on your trading chart permanently.

What is the monthly chart useful for?

One thing mainly: seeing where price sits within its long-term range. It is far too coarse for entries, but it answers whether you are buying near the top of a multi-year range or the bottom of one, which changes how a trade on any lower timeframe should be treated.

Do long-term trades cost more to hold?

Yes. Leveraged positions accrue swap or financing every night, so a position held for months can accumulate a charge comparable to a significant part of the expected move. On the favourable side of an interest-rate differential it can instead be a small credit. Always check the rate before a long hold.

Do I need a big account to trade weekly charts?

Not a big balance, but you do need small position increments. A stop of several hundred pips at fixed percentage risk produces a very small position, and if that falls below your broker's minimum lot the trade is not available to you. Micro or fractional sizing solves this; raising your risk percentage does not.

Should I wait for the weekly candle to close?

Yes, if the weekly chart is your decision timeframe. A weekly candle takes five days to complete and can change character entirely in the final two. If you want a more precise entry on a weekly thesis, take it from the daily or 4-hour chart instead.

Is the weekly chart good for beginners?

The reading of it is, and every beginner should be marking weekly levels. Trading it directly is harder than it looks, because trades last months, stops are very wide and positions must be very small. Learn the rhythm on the 4-hour or daily chart first.

Why do weekly charts look different between brokers?

Because brokers define the trading week differently and some feeds include a short Sunday session, which creates an extra candle or distorts the weekly wicks. If a rule of yours depends on a weekly high, low or close, check how your provider builds the candle.